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.
I’ve been using nextgen gallery for awhile now, and I find it to be the better one compare to some of the other gallery plug ins. It is by no means perfect, but it is quite nice.
best plugin i’ve seen yet. Keep up the good work!
I’m very new to blogging, but was planning a wordpress blog, so this plugin will work great with my photography gallery idea. Cheers.
i installed the nextgen gallery on my bosses site for his girls acting website and it works like a charm.
by the way the lady pirate in the post, my wife has been wanting that statue for the last 2 years. I probably should just buy it so I can have two hot babes in my house.
Wow.. this is pretty awesome, but entirely a diffnerent language to me. I am REALLY trying to understand how the whole
extension thing works. Do you need to have a local version or can you use the one hosted BY the blogging company? For instance
if i dont have a blog on my host, but instead on word press’s site, can i still use extensions?
Thanks
Lindsay B @ bscphoto.com
Hey, nice shot of Mr. Bigglesworth’s.
replace your 1st pic, please))))) uah…..
Hey, for embedding video code, here is a plug in I use that works pretty good. you can toggle the editor on and off without having to go back and forth into the settings. it sits right on the post page. It;s from Jack Humphreys.
Here’s the link.
toggle visual editor for video blog posts
I use it and it works.
Previously, we were embedding the flash photo gallery feature provided by our hosting provider, 1and1.com.
What were you guys using before? We went through a few wp plugins for coppermine, tried nextgen, and finally (after tons of code tweaks) stuck with gallery2 and the wpg2 plugin.
Harvey gets our most observant reader award for the funniest comment yet.
you got a picture of canned pork brains, and everybody wants to comment on what program you’re using!
I was looking for a plugin just like this one the other day, thanks for it. I’m definitely going to test it out soon!
very nice plugin. Don’t know why I didn’t use the plugin earlier
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
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.
Hey, nice shot of Mr. Bigglesworth’s ass Jim, keep up the good work Ansel!
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.