Nextgen Gallery use and changes

Nextgen Galery is the most popular image gallery plugin for WordPress and the pro version has a lot of nice features. It works pretty well now that many bugs following the upgrade to 2.0 were fixed by Photocrati.

My posts use this shortcode:

[ ngg_images tag_ids=”140325″ display_type=”photocrati-nextgen_pro_masonry” featured_image_path-=”de1408/DE14088422_HDR.jpg”] [ nggg]

(the extra spaces are there to stop the code from executing in this tech post). The image tags I use for the posts have the key word yymmdd added in Lightroom to select photos for that date. I think the pro masonry gallery format works best for my posts. I set the width of the posts to 295 px with 5 px padding so it will show two wide on standard pages and three wide on full-width pages.

I added the shortcode for featured image path so I would not have to go to the admin area to select the image. The Nextgen admin section for this is very slow and cumbersome. I cut and paste the file name from Lightroom into this shortcode.

The nggg short code specifies where the Geo map will go on the page. I modified the Geo plugin to get its images using the Nextgen tag_ids shortcode data. If there are no images with location data on the post then the map does not show on the page.

For ecommerce to allow full resolution downloads without a watermark I had to do considerable research and debugging. I had been using the Lightroom plugin for NextGEN Gallery Export by alloyphoto, but have now given that up in favor of FTP. The full resolution images go in a folder named “backup” and the file names have “backup_” added to the left of them. They are jpegs with 100% quality. The images for display are reduced to fit in a box 1200 px square and have quality 80% to keep file sizes down. They have a faint watermark centered on the bottom.

-- David Elmore