Review: NextGEN Gallery, The Best Wordpress Gallery Plugin
Do NOT kill yourself while trying to find image management plugins that work. It took me 5 hours on Friday to find a plugin–or combination of plugins–that fulfilled what I thought were some simple requirements. I wanted to die. I wanted to kill others. I ate pandas. But I have come out of this experience a new man, with the knowledge that I now possess the best gallery plugin for Wordpress. And I am sharing it with you, gentle reader.
If you want an example of what I’m doing with NextGEN Gallery, look at my Reverse Beard Styles post. For more extensive examples, check out the plugin home page and the Wordpress.org plugin page.
Onto my requirements!
Batch Upload
This would not be such a freaking big deal if you could easily import into the database images you’d FTP’d onto the server. I tried a standalone ZIP uploader, no dice. I tried several other galleries, and no dice. NextGEN Gallery includes a handy dandy zip file uploader, and it works.
Photo tagging
NextGEN does this beautifully. You create galleries which you can always visit and update not only the alt and title tags, but actual semantic tagging. OMFG, this may not sound awesome, but it is. You can also rename the images, which is helpful, since my images are always called something in the vein of DSC01338.jpg.
LightBox
I can’t help myself. I am a sucker for a pop-up image. Especially when it expands sexily. Not only does NextGEN Gallery include ThickBox, it is easily configurable to integrate seamlessly with several other options. I chose Lightbox 2, because it does its job with no hassle and comes with a few styles.
You don’t even have to use a pop-up image thing, either. If you’re old-school.
Easy syntax
What I don’t understand is why other gallery plugins won’t allow you to FTP the files onto your webserver, yet require you to reference your images by path. Gah! NextGEN Gallery provides several different ways to work with images individually or in batches. You can either access images by their unique id, by gallery id, album id, or semantic tag.
So in my beards post, I was able to tag each sequential facial hair style with beard1, beard2, etc, and post a mini-gallery using (I replaced the brackets with parens, because Wordpress keeps eating my keycodes and spitting out brackets, which it then proceeds to eat):
(tags=beard1)
The individual images can be resized upon insertion into the post, and they maintain aspect ratio, thus:
(singlepic=1,250,250,left)
Inserts image with id=1, with maximum width and height of 250, and sets it to class=”alignleft”
And this is just scratching the surface. NextGEN’s sidebar widget comes as a separate plugin, which I appreciate, because I’m not using it. Next I’m going to check out the NextGEN SmoothGallery plugin, because SmoothGallery is pretty. [UPDATE: NextGEN SmoothGallery plugin does not seem to work at the moment. Maybe I'm screwing it up.]
That’s it for my review. I give NextGEN Gallery 73 out of 74 flaming gorillas. You must use this plugin. It is essential for anyone who has noticed how crap Wordpress’s image handling is.
I will be reviewing more plugins soon. I just had so very much to say about this one.
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2 Responses to “Review: NextGEN Gallery, The Best Wordpress Gallery Plugin”
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It’s my opinion that much of the WordPress 2.5 image gallery improvements were based on a simplification of NextGEN Gallery…without any credit to Alex.