Recently, I created a new landing page for Ultralight Backpacking Network. It features a grid of images posted by the site’s users. Ultralight Backpacking Network is using BuddyPress Album+ to manage users’ photo albums, so I needed to figure out a way to display BuddyPress Album+ images anywhere on the site. It turns out that BuddyPress Album+ makes this a relatively easy task. You retrieve the images using a loop, a process familiar to anyone who has modified or created a WordPress theme. Here’s an example of a BuddyPress Album+ loop:

<div id="photos">
<?php bp_album_query_pictures('per_page=5'); ?>
<?php if ( bp_album_has_pictures() ) : ?>
        <ul class="thumb">
        <?php while ( bp_album_has_pictures() ) : bp_album_the_picture(); ?>
                <li>
                        <a href="<?php bp_album_picture_middle_url(); ?>" title="<?php bp_album_picture_title(); ?>">
                                <img src='<?php bp_album_picture_thumb_url() ?>' alt="<?php bp_album_picture_desc(); ?>" />
                        </a>
                </li>
        <?php endwhile; ?>
        </ul> 
<?php endif; ?>
</div>

Notice how similar it is to the WordPress loop. An important thing to remember is that you must first call the function bp_album_query_pictures() before you can start the BuddyPress Album+ Loop. This function initializes the Query object used for the loop. The bp_album_query_pictures() function supports a few different parameters:

• owner_id - This is the numeric ID of the user whose photos you wish to display.
• id - This is the numeric ID of the photo you wish to display. Only used if you wish to display a single photo.
• privacy - Retrieve photos based on privacy settings. Can be one of the following:
  • public - photos visible to everyone
  • members - photos visible to members
  • friends- photos visible to friends of the current user
  • private- photos visible to the current user
  • admin- photos visible to the site administrator
• adjacent- Used to select a photo immediately preceding or succeeding the photo specified by id. Use one of either:
  • next - select the next photo
  • prev - select the previous photo
• orderkey- Specify which field to use to sort the photos. This is one of the following:
  • id - sort by the numeric ID of the photos
  • user_id- sort by the numeric ID of the users who uploaded the photos
  • status- sort based on the status of the photos
• ordersort- Specify the order in which to sort the photos. One of either:
  • ASC - sort in ascending order
  • DESC - sort in descending order
• per_page - The number of photos you would like to display per page. If you want 24 photos, this is where you would specify that.
• offset- Start selecting photos after a certain offset.

Once you’ve started the loop, you have a few different options depending on how you want to display the data. Here are some of the template tags you can use:

• bp_album_picture_title - Prints the title of the image.
• bp_album_picture_desc - Prints the image description.
• bp_album_picture_id - Prints the numeric ID of the image.
• bp_album_picture_url - Prints the URL to the page where the image is located.
• bp_album_picture_original_url - Prints the URL to the original image.
• bp_album_picture_middle_url - Prints the URL to the scaled image.
• bp_album_picture_thumb_url- Prints the URL to the image thumbnail.
• bp_album_adjacent_links - Prints links to the preceding and succeeding albums or images.

There are several other template tags you can use – too many to list here, in fact. For more information, check out includes/bp-album-templatetags.php in the bp-album folder. If you want to display information about the album author, you are going to need a few additional template tags that don’t come with BuddyPress Album+ by default. See this post for more details. That’s enough information to get you up and running with custom BuddyPress Album+ themes.