How to filter WordPress galleries by image tags

Decide which labels visitors will actually use, such as landscape, portrait or wedding. Keep spelling and capitalisation consistent. Tags should describe reusable properties, not one-off notes that will create a long filter list.

Give each image every relevant tag. A photograph can belong to several groups, so do not force yourself to choose only one label.

WordPress core can display an image gallery, but it does not provide a built-in visitor-facing filter that reads image tags. The manual route requires you to register a taxonomy for media attachments, assign terms to images, query matching attachments, and build the filter controls and front-end update behaviour in a custom template or plugin.

This is suitable for a developer-controlled site, but it is easy to break pagination, lightboxes, caching or theme updates. Put custom code in a site-specific plugin or child theme rather than editing a parent theme. For most site owners, use a gallery plugin instead.

Install and activate a gallery plugin that supports image tags and front-end filtering. Envira Gallery with its Tags Addon is one route: the addon adds tags to Media Library images and provides gallery settings for displaying those tags as filters. The feature is not part of the standard WordPress gallery block.

Before changing a live gallery, confirm that the base gallery plugin and the addon are both active. If the addon is inactive, existing tag fields or filter settings may not appear.

Open Media » Library, edit each image, and add its tags in the image metadata panel. In Envira, tags added from the Media Library are also available from the Envira tag management screen, where you can view the number of assigned images and open the matching media items.

Save the metadata after each change, or use the available bulk tools where appropriate. A common Friday-afternoon mistake is tagging only the gallery items or only the attachment records: the filter must use the same tag data that the gallery addon reads. Envira specifically warns that tag counts are not accurate when images are tagged inside a gallery instead of from the Media Library.

Edit the gallery and open its tag or filtering settings. Turn on the option to enable tag filtering, then choose which tags should appear in the filter list. Save or update the gallery and place its shortcode or block on the required page.

Open the page in a logged-out browser and click each filter. Check that tagged images appear, untagged images disappear, the lightbox still opens the correct image, and the controls work on a phone. Envira’s documented workflow uses a gallery tag setting to display selectable filters above the gallery.

If the filter is missing, confirm that the addon is activated, the images have saved tags, and the gallery was updated after tagging. Clear page, object and CDN caches, then check again in a private browser window.

Do not enable a separate gallery search feature without checking its interaction with tag filtering. Envira documents that enabling its Search Addon hides the Tags Addon options, although visitors can still search by assigned tags. Choose either visible tag controls or the search interface if the two settings conflict.

For the fast way, use the Envira Gallery Tags Addon. It is designed for multi-tag image organisation and visitor filtering, so you can avoid building a custom attachment taxonomy, query and front-end filter system.