Tutorial to switch to a lighter and safer gallery that is part of WP Core

Pieter Bos
(@senlin)

10 years, 8 months ago

On March 9, 2007 developer Alex Rabe started with a new project; the development of a plugin that would see 5 million downloads by the time he was lucky enough to sell the plugin to a company that would take over development.
The plugin I’m talking about is NextGen Gallery (or NGG).

I think that everyone who has been working with WordPress for longer than 5 years has at one point in the past years installed NGG and although the plugin is quite complex, for a long time it has been a pleasure to work with once you understood how it worked.

At the time Alex released his NextGen Gallery plugin the native Gallery function of WordPress was either still non-existing or not great; to be honest I cannot remember. Around mid 2010, when WordPress released version 3.0, it (finally) shipped with a gallery function that over the years has been vastly improved.

However, people already running NGG did not immediately (want to) switch to the native Gallery function of WordPress, because that would mean a massive overhaul of their sites. NGG saves full images and thumbs of each image in different folders, it uses albums that can contain multiple galleries, it has different kinds of overlay effects and comes with slideshows and what not.

On June 19, 2012 Alex came with the news that his biggest supporter, Photocrati, had taken over the active development of the NextGen Gallery plugin.

With that many people were hoping that implementation of new features and squashing of existing bugs would become faster. Photocrati also released a premium version with more special effects and what not. Probably not what most people were looking for, but for the company one of the ways to keep active development going.

Compared to the native Gallery function of WordPress NGG had become quite the database query slurper and unfortunately that didn’t seem to improve after the takeover. If you’d ask me, that would be an area where first and foremost improvements should have been made.

In July this year (2013) Photocrati came with a “major update and overhaul to NextGEN Gallery” and although it might work for some of the 7mio+ users, it has definitely broken the websites of many people. This forum is filled with threads of people complaining and in distress and although the company must be working overtime, I think it’s all a bit overwhelming.

Having one of the most popular plugins in the WordPress Plugin Repository is great to boast with, but it also comes with huge responsibilities and those cannot be taken lightly. If I introduce a bug in a plugin that has a few hundred downloads, people are not going to be happy and they will tell me so. If your plugin has more than 7 million downloads and you introduce a bug that you cannot solve within a few hours, I think you better pack your bags and go home.

Here is a little tutorial for if you want to switch to something that is lighter, safer and in constant development: http://wpti.ps/?p=329

http://wordpress.org/plugins/nextgen-gallery/

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)

xxxevilgrinxxx
(@xxxevilgrinxxx)

10 years, 8 months ago

Thanks for this. I have a pics-heavy site and have really been dreading that I would have to switch to WP native gallery and hoping that NGG would pull it together after this 2.0 thing. I’m thinking I may just have to knuckle down and do that.

faospark
(@faospark)

10 years, 8 months ago

I’ve have always admired this plugin and in fact ive been using on sites that i manage, the longest is actually almost 3 years now. True that WP core’s native gallery function is a better alternative now.

Herbert
(@hneugebauer)

10 years, 8 months ago

Well. I’ve been concerned of the last few weeks about the problems with NGG. Myself I first didn’t have time to attempt updating, then saw the problems, and remain with the last 1.x version for now.
Let’s give them time… they are in sweat for sure, tough job.

On that “tutorial”, nice short description. Pretty obvious though.

Sorry, but this works if you publish your 10-20 pics at a time. But if you manage photography, with a professional picture library and then want to publish your 600-2000 pictures, split into different galleries, including automatic picture descriptions (stored in IPTC), tags and stuff automatically shown on your web-site… the out of the box functionality is just by far not enough.

I stay with last 1.x version of NGG for now and wait until they fix it. In the end, they likely will fix it… or someone else is doing it. Let’s give them time… they screwed up, they should learn from it.

Thread Starter Pieter Bos
(@senlin)

10 years, 8 months ago

@herbert, fair enough, it will take quite a bit of time and effort to switch an existing site with so many pictures. I hope that NGG figures out their stuff soon for you.

chickwithbob
(@chickwithbob)

10 years, 8 months ago

Does anyone here know of a good replacement for the nextgen gallery?

The main deal breaker for us is the inability to manage the images in separate folders. I have sites that have thousands of images, hundreds of which are uploaded on a weekly basis – hence the core WP gallery image management functions are not enough for us. Trying to locate images in a single media area is a nightmare.

Any other image management plugins worth checking out?
I don’t care about the front-end gallery displays since we write our own code for this.

If anyone has a suggestion I’d appreciate it – I am starting the process of porting code away from nextgen since the way Photocrati has managed their deployments and updates proves too risky for me to continue with them.

Thread Starter Pieter Bos
(@senlin)

10 years, 8 months ago

If you can write your own code to display the front end, then I’m sure you can figure out a way to use different folders for images that you upload, no?

chickwithbob
(@chickwithbob)

10 years, 8 months ago

The core WP system doesn’t store the images in separated user-defined folders. It lumps them all into the dated folder system.

This was the beauty and forte of the nextgen system.

Could I write it myself? Probably.
But I’d rather not reinvent the wheel if it’s out there.

Thread Starter Pieter Bos
(@senlin)

10 years, 8 months ago

You can choose to store image in date based folders or in another folder. And I am sure that you can also quite easily built a custom solution.
Anyways, you have a lot of pictures, so like Herbert above, you probably need to sit it out and hope that one they Photocrati gets their act together regarding NGG.
Good luck!

VesaT
(@vesat)

10 years, 8 months ago

I’ve been a long-time user of NGG and the bugs introduced with 2.0 really bothered me. One of my sites has more than 2.000 images so WP media gallery really is not an option, and NGG is pretty much the only choice available for free at least.

The current release 2.0.11 works for me now pretty much ok, even though I’ve been forced e.g. to replace MapPress plugin with other map plugins (Easy2map and Nokia Maps and Places) in a couple of cases, and both map plugin replacements would have happened anyway since I tend to favour responsive site designs currently and MapPress is not responsive like the two above. And NGG 2.0 is responsive when NGG 1.9.x still isn’t. For photography sites responsive layouts are obviously a complicated matter as many designers favour a fixed layout – which really do not work with mobile devices 🙂

There are a couple of real issues with NGG still for me, one of the most important ones being translation. It also would be nice to get an understanding on how to use the “legacy NGG” edits e.g. to display a gallery name with the displayed gallery. But overall, Photocrati has really worked hard and got most of the really complicated structure to work by now.

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)

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