Installing the GD image library

Hi - I’m hosting a WordPress site on my droplet (Ubuntu 14.04 x64). On the site I installed a plugin called NextGEN Gallery (more info on that you can check it out but basically it is a photo gallery plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/nextgen-gallery/).

In my local site running on MAMP the plugin functions normally and the site works. However, in my live environment whenever I attempt to use the plugin to create a new gallery (including photos) I get this error from the plugin:

“The site does not support the GD Image library. Please ask your hosting provider to enable it.”

I read through the support forums for the plguin and found a number of people who have had the same issue depending on the hosting provider they were using.

I have been searching the community here for this issue and came across this post which seems to be my exact question: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/how-do-i-install-the-gd-library-on-my-droplet

I’ve extremely unfamiliar and uncomfortable doing this sort of thing so I just want to be certain I follow the right steps here.

It sounds like first I need to use this command to install the GD library: sudo apt-get install php5-gd

Then I need to restart apache2 using this command: sudo service apache2 restart

At this point the above thread loses me. It sounds like I may need to make some change to my php.ini file which lives here: etc/php5/apache2. But it’s unclear to me if I really need to do that as I have really no idea if I am or am not using the default php.ini file.

Any help would be greatly appreciated as I really don’t know what I am doing and I don’t want to mess anything up!