Attaching images to multiple galleries

Question

I've been wondering about this image/gallery issue for ages.

So, I've got some images:

lifestyle1.jpg, lifestyle2.jpg, lifestyle3.jpg, lifestyle4.jpg, kids1.jpg, kids2.jpg, kids3.jpg, outdoors1.jpg, outdoors2.jpg, etc....

I want to have three galleries:

1. Homepage —a mixture of all photos
2. Lifestyle —just lifestyle
3. Outdoors — just outdoors
4. Kids— just kids

I can obviously make a page called Lifestyle, attach the lifestyles images and I'm all set with my Lifestyle gallery.

How do I make my Homepage gallery a mixture of all pictures? ie:

Homepage - lifestyle1.jpg, lifestyle2.jpg, kids2.jpg, outdoors1.jpg

When all these photos are already in the media library. It seems so basic, yet I can't see a way to do it besides re-attaching and re-uploading the same images again.

Thanks!

Answer 1

If you open wp-includes/media.php file you will see such code in gallery_shortcode function:

...
if ( !empty($include) ) {
    $include = preg_replace( '/[^0-9,]+/', '', $include );
    $_attachments = get_posts( array('include' => $include, 'post_status' => 'inherit', 'post_type' => 'attachment', 'post_mime_type' => 'image', 'order' => $order, 'orderby' => $orderby) );
    ...
}
...

It means that you can use gallery shortcode with include attribute, where you can insert ids of all images which you require for gallery:

[gallery include="45,59,61,62"]