Giving the NextGEN WordPress Gallery a Shot
Posted by: Jim in WordPress, Work
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We’ve been looking for a great image manager to replace the current gallery solution provided by our host, so I checked out Christophe’s travel blog. Chris informed me that the NextGEN photo gallery plugin has improved since I last gave it a try. Indeed it has.
Let’s take it for a test run here. If it works out to everyone’s delight, you may be seeing some major changes to our roadtripping fulltimer photo gallery. Hopefully the NextGEN photo gallery, albums, and slideshow integration will help us save time and improve this blog. Please let us know what you think.
Immediate Observations:
- I was excited to hear that NextGEN allows for bulk image uploads as zipped archives. I was disappointed to discover that doesn’t work. At least not for me on my Mac. But I even had René create a .zip on her PC.
- Gallery creation is simple … once I created a master Gallery folder (…/wp-content/gallery) and set its permissions to 777.
- Upload of multiple individual images at one time was easy, quick, and done without leaving the WordPress interface.
That first image, as ugly as it is, was inserted directly from the Write Post page. NextGEN adds a convenient tab to the upload section that lets you browse all gallery images. If you click on the image above, you can view it larger without leaving this page like all our previous posts. 
So now, let’s see how the Gallery function functions …
Here’s a gallery of images from our trip to New Bern, NC. You can browse all the images by clicking on one to view them larger. Or, choose to view them as a slideshow
Pretty cool. But if you install NextGEN, don’t get confused when you try to use the Tiny MCE button (
) and all you get is a snippet of code. That’s the call tag for displaying your gallery. You don’t get a live preview in the post editor. But it obviously renders properly when published. Assuming the viewer doesn’t have any Javascript or Flash issues with their browser.
Here’s the same gallery displayed in the Image Browser format, which is different than the slideshow.
At first glance, it looks like the plugin has comprehensive capabilities and management options within its own array of tabs available to the admin. It seems one will get the most out of NextGEN if they understand the full functionality of the tags used to display galleries, albums and images. Here is a good place to start.
At the risk of getting to geeky, I once again digress. Hopefully this works. I believe it at least deserves a deeper look. We may just have our work cut out for us. Please report any technical difficulties you encounter.
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November 26th, 2007 at 1:06 am
A few more observations about The NextGEN plugin from the viewer’s view.
If you edit a post with an Image Browser tag using the Visual Editor, the code with break throwing everything out of whack. Similar to what happens when embedding YouTube videos. Deselect the Visual Editor option in your profile to avoid this, or be prepared to fix the tag.
When clicking through images in the Browser mode, the page reloads, but does not jump to where the browser is forcing viewers to scroll down.
November 26th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
Hey, nice shot of Mr. Bigglesworth’s ass Jim, keep up the good work Ansel!
November 28th, 2007 at 1:00 am
Uh, we’re having technical difficulties with this one, which is why you’re seeing photos reverting to the old format. Stay tuned as Jim comes up with a solution.
April 7th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
I must have been living under a rock that I missed this plugin. Hhhhhmmm… I’ll test this with my next project. Thanks for sharing.
- Dulce
May 14th, 2008 at 10:16 pm
very nice plugin. Don’t know why I didn’t use the plugin earlier