NextGEN Gallery Plugin Review

NextGEN Gallery is a very popular image gallery plugin for WordPress that makes it easier to manage and organize your images. We recommend it for use on any site where you want to show off multiple images. You can quickly and easily create elegant thumbnail galleries and slideshows. You can then use Lightbox Plus, FancyBox for WordPress, or other Lightbox-type plugins in conjunction with NextGEN Gallery to add popup effects to your images when clicked.

Better Gallery Management

NextGEN Gallery provides a lot of useful image management features. You can do a lot of things easier with NextGEN Gallery than with the native WordPress media library, such as:

• Edit title and alt text for multiple images on the same screen. This makes it much easier when editing multiple images. You don’t have to click through different screens to get to each image’s info.
• Edit the portion of the image used for the thumbnail. This is particularly useful for instances where you want to highlight a particular part of the image, or when the thumbnail dimensions aren’t relative to the full-size image dimensions. For example, the default landscape-oriented thumbnails could cut off heads from portrait-oriented photos.
• Sort the order of your images by dragging and dropping thumbnails. You can also automatically sort the images by other criteria, such as file name or date created.
• Exclude certain images from showing up in the gallery without deleting them from the gallery. This is useful if you want to hide an image temporarily but don’t want to go through the trouble of deleting and re-uploading it.

Slideshows

NextGEN Gallery makes it easy to create slideshows. Simply create a gallery for the images you want to include in the slideshow, and embed the slideshow in your page, post, or widget. You can use the Add NextGEN Gallery button in the page/post editor to select the gallery from a drop-down list, or you can type out the shortcode manually.

There are a variety of slideshow options. You can use various transition effects, change the slide duration, set the default slideshow size, set colors, background music, and more. The NextGEN Gallery slideshow even works on browsers and devices that do not have Flash enabled, such as iPhones and iPads.

Additional Capabilities

NextGEN Gallery also provides widgets for random or recent images, as well as a widget for displaying slideshows. If gallery organization isn’t enough, you can further organize your galleries into albums. And in the options panel, you can set a watermark, set default thumbnail sizes, automatically resize images upon upload (though we strongly recommend resizing images before uploading), and much more.

For instructions and recommendations on usage, please see the NextGEN Gallery tutorial page.