Thanks for your question, which highlights a basic difference between MLA and the standard WordPress [gallery] approach to composing gallery displays.
WordPress, as you’ve discovered, most often composes a gallery by showing you thumbnails of your Media Library items and letting you select the images you want “visually”. MLA does not offer visual support; it uses a rules-based approach to composing galleries.
MLA’s [mla_gallery] shortcode has a number of parameters to filter your gallery display. You can use custom fields, date ranges or MIME types to compose your gallery. By far the most popular are the taxonomy parameters. You can use MLA to assign terms (categories and/or tags) to your items and then use the terms to filter your display. For example, you could divide your items into “landscape”, “cityscape” and “seascape” categories and then show the landscapes by coding:
[mla_gallery attachment_category=landscape]
As you upload new items and assign them to categories they automatically get included in your gallery displays. MLA provides the [mla_term_list] and [mla_tag_cloud] shortcodes to compose forms and clouds that let users pick terms dynamically.
You can find more information and several examples in the Settings/Media Library Assistant Documentation tab.
I hope that gives you a better idea of how MLA might work in your application. I am marking this topic resolved, but please update it if you have problems or further questions about the above suggestions; I am happy to give you whatever help I can. Thanks for your interest in the plugin.
