Creating an Image Roster

I can think of a couple of easy ways you can do it without using a plugin.

For both, you need to first make sure all your photos are the same dimensions so it will look clean and professional. You can use a batch-resizing program in your favorite OS to do that quickly.

Option one would be to create a gallery on a WordPress page or post by logging into the admin, editing the page/post and putting the cursor where you want the gallery. Click the Insert Media button, then click “Create Gallery” in the left column. Select the images you want to include in the order your want them to appear in the gallery, putting the brother’s name in for Alt and the Caption for each photo. Click the Create Gallery button, then set the Link To to “none” and the Columns to the number of columns you want. (Make sure to pick a number that will fit in your theme.) Click Insert Gallery and you’re done.

The second option is to insert the images one at a time, selecting “left” for the alignment of each image. In most themes, this will give you a nice row of images as wide as is allowed by the width of your theme’s content area and the width of the images, with columns as needed to display all the images. Again, you would select “none” for the “link to” and include the brother’s names as the Alt and Caption values for the images.

The gallery option will end up giving you thumbnails of the images. The second option will allow you to use full-sized images.

If it were me, I’d experiment with a few photos using each method before doing them all to see which you like best.

Sure, the caption is HTML-enabled for most things. Just type a <br /> wherever you want the line break.

I just tested it in the theme Twenty Thirteen, and if I enter the captions as I add each photo to the gallery, they show up when I hover the cursor over the image in the post, but they aren’t in the tag if I look at the Text tab of the editor. I see the same tag that you show, so the captions are tied to the images, not to the gallery tag. My second line is displaying correctly.

When I switched the theme to Twenty Ten, the caption is displayed beneath the images in the gallery without having to hover the cursor over them, so that is a function of the theme, apparently.

In both cases, the second line is working for the caption. If you have it entered in the Caption field for each image like this:

First Line<br />Second Line

then you’re doing it correctly. Seeing it as text instead of the HTML being honored may be due to the theme you’re using. You can try switching to a default theme to see if your theme is what’s causing the problem.