Not everyone needs a fancy-schmancy plugin to displays galleries on their WordPress site. For many, the gallery functionality built into WordPress is powerful enough to create a basic grid of photos. By default, the WordPress gallery includes all images attached to a post or page. But what if you want to exclude a photo from your gallery? (For example, you’ve already used it in the post and don’t want it to show up twice.)

It’s really simple to exclude images from the default WordPress gallery. Create your gallery like normal, and make sure you’re in the HTML editor of your post or page. You’ll see something like

[gallery columns="4"]

Next, you’ll need the ID number for the photo you want to exclude. Go to the Media area of your dashboard, hover over the photo and note its attachment ID number. Then, simply add

exclude="numberhere"

inside your gallery shortcode. You can exclude multiple images by separating with a comma. All together, it will look like this:

[gallery columns="4" exclude="575,582"]

Hope that helps!