Nextgen Gallery Geo fixes

When I changed to the Lucid theme, I wanted to place maps on the bottom of each post showing where the photos were taken. I looked over the available plugins and chose Nextgen Gallery Geo that had all the features I wanted. The only problem was that, as a lot of 1–star ratings pointed out, it didn’t work. The author has not fixed it to work with the recent big upgrade of Nextgen Gallery to version 2.0. So I spent several days debugging it and changing the way it worked in my blog.

Nextgen does not store the latitude and longitude along with other exif data in the database, so I had to change Geo to only read the data from the image file. This data would be there as long as I did not have Nextgen resize the image after uploading.

To find the images to map, I programmed Geo to look for the Nextgen shortcode tag_ids= which I used to display the thumbs. I inserted a key word using lightroom.

The PHP unsearialize function did not work on the Nextgen data so I changed Geo to use the same special function that Nextgen uses.

I could not get the ajax feature to work, so I place the map on the bottom of every page using just the shortcode . If there is no gps data, the map is not displayed.

I use pins on the map to show locations of the photos. When you hover over a pin, a thumb is shown along with exif data. I modified the exif data to show only one item per line. Lines are there only when the data exists. For example the shutter speed is not there for HDR photos since they are a combination of several shutter speeds.

Contact me if you want a copy of the PHP code that works with WordPress 3.92 and Nextgen. It does not work with WordPress 4, but you can probably fix it if you know some PHP.

-- David Elmore