There are a few plugins here at Nicasio Design that we find ourselves using over and over again on multiple projects, and with everyone from individuals to large corporations wanting to add photo galleries to their sites it seems inevitable that one of these plugins would be NextGEN Gallery.
NextGEN does perfectly what so many other photo gallery plugins try to do but always fall short. It delivers a very robust system for the management, categorization and display of your photos. Whether you have 5 photos from your last family picnic or you need to manage the portfolios of a dozen photographers, NextGEN has you covered.
Let’s start by taking a look at the admin interface.
This is the ‘dashboard’ of NextGEN. It gives you an overview of all of your photo gallery activities as well as some valuable server information (for the more technically inclined). This info can be valuable if there’s something weird going on with the upload process.
Moving onto the upload interface.
The uploader built into NextGEN is one of its strongest features. It allows you to upload individual photos, groups of photos, a zipped archive of photos (great for those of you with limited bandwidth), or import a folder of images from somewhere on your server. Basically wherever your photos are, you will be able to easily import them into NextGEN.
The settings area of the admin is fairly straight forward. One of the nice features is that you can easily make use of AJAX effects including Thickbox, Lightbox, Highslide and Shutter without doing any sort of coding.
One of the features that I really like with NextGEN is the ability to watermark your images. In this day and age it is almost inevitable that if you have original content on your site, someone else will want to “borrow” it. With a watermark at least you will still get some credit.
NextGEN makes it easy to add cool widgets to your site using any 1 of the 3 included widgets. All are also highly customizable.
NextGEN also makes it easy to add your galleries to posts and pages by adding an “Add Gallery” button to the visual editor.
With all of this functionality shouln’t you probably use NextGEN for your next project that features a photo gallery?
You can checkout Alex Rabe’s (the plugin author) website at: http://alexrabe.boelinger.com/wordpress-plugins/nextgen-gallery/