Adding Images To The Gallery

I was developing a website and the client asked me to add a gallery on a page using the standard gallery feature of WordPress. For those who haven’t had a chance to try this feature, I must say it’s very useful and if you want to create a simple gallery in any post or page, simply type [ gallery ] (without spaces) anywhere and watch the results.

I read about gallery shortcode on WordPress codex but this didn’t help me to answer the simple question, how do I add images from my computer to the gallery? I already had dozens of images in the Media Library, but none of them seemed to appear in the gallery. Furthermore, I didn’t see the way how to include some of the images from the library. The Gallery tab was empty and simply there’s no way to fill it. Then I decided to re-upload some of the images and did the following:

1. In the WordPress dashboard, I clicked the Posts (or Pages) and started to edit the post where I need to create a gallery.
2. Clicked Upload/Insert button that’s just above the editor pane.
3. I selected some images from my computer and uploaded them again (although they already were in my Media Library.
4. They are now listed in the Gallery tab and in the place of the page where I entered the gallery shortcode, those images are now shown.

My WordPress version in the time of writing this post is 3.4.2. I am really wondering why there’s not an easier and more logic way to insert some images from the library to the gallery. I believe something like that will be a nice improvement of the WP’s user experience. Hopefully, one of the future versions will make this procedure easier.