WordPress Plugin Review: NextGEN Gallery Photo Gallery

I just installed the NextGEN Gallery photo gallery for WordPress. I think the gallery is very good, but somewhat difficult to implement.

The installation, like most WordPress plugins, was easy and fast. Getting the NextGEN Gallery to do what I wanted it to do was problematic. Mind you, I was not trying to get a highly customized version of the gallery: I just wanted to display some pictures on a page.

Unfortunately, there is conflicting information about the tag syntax, so just stick with what’s documented on the WordPress plugin page. Once I uploaded some images, I could not see my gallery.

Even though the page where I included the gallery had only one line of text in it, the css code for NextGEN Gallery pushed the gallery down off my screen. Once I realized the gallery was actually showing 0n the page, I then searched the NextGEN FAQs to find out that I had to delete some css code to get the Gallery thumbnails to display below the text on the page.
You can read about the fix here: http://alexrabe.de/wordpress-plugins/nextgen-gallery/faq/

Other than the hour I wasted trying to figure out the display issue, I found that the gallery is pretty easy to use and has some great features:

• You can upload zip files with multiple images; a great time saver.
• You can specify a default image resize
• You can easily arrange the image order by dragging and dropping the images
• You can add captions and keywords to the images
• There is a View with PicLens feature that provides a nice, flash-based slideshow.

Many thanks to the developers of the NextGen Gallery.