Could Be Useful For Some, not for ex-NextGen’ers

It works okay if you are starting from new, not as granular or versatile as NextGen which has its own problematic history, mostly leverages built-in features of WP’s Media Library like Gallery mode and uses a script called Escape NextGen Gallery to export NextGen galleries into WP galleries which it then will replace shortcodes with FooGallery shortcodes in posts to help you migrate.

Which would be handy, but there are several generations of NextGen from different proprietors and also a fork called Nextcellent (which if it was maintained would be the best gallery on WP, but it has been left untended for years) and so the insertion shortcodes can vary even on one site as years went by: The exporter only works with one shortcode so –for one example– no single image posts will be automatically replaced unless the user had created a new gallery in NextGen for each new photo and inserted that gallery instead of a single photo. I created a yearly Singlepics(YY) Gallery for those photos so I was out of luck with the replacement.

The gallery that the single image is in will be replicated in WP’s Media library in a gallery from with an imported title, but the images would need to be manually inserted in every single-image post.

I was and am grateful that they added this functionality, but then another issue popped up, which is unwanted fancy framing and rollover stuff, the default is a kind of smoked glass framing with captions, which is possibly fine for some, but one cannot bulk edit to something plainer because there is no global pref setting for appearance, each gallery must be set for the desired appearance, in my case over 100 of them.

The inbuilt WP image handling which FG uses also requires each image to be edited manually. And the original dates do not transfer, so all images date on the day of conversion, which makes sorting to find something more difficult.

Compared to NextGen posts on the same pageload of 10 posts, FG was very slow to display images, this may be because of WP issues, but it could also be because FG has lots of fancy templates, the photos don’t appear to load directly, there is a whirling icon for a while, like some javascript is working.

FG points out that it uses no additional database tables, and this actually makes it harder to fix things from the back end, I do not see this as a plus.

For now I’ve decided to go back to the potentially troubled NextGen/Nextcellent system. the difference in ease of usage is strong enough that I’m tempted to learn programming so that I an keep a fork of Nextcellent going.

I thank Foo for their efforts, the result is more for users who are concerned with presentation style and are starting fresh than refugees from NextGen.

• This topic was modified 3 years, 7 months ago by Jan Dembowski. Reason: Deleted link, don't put those in reviews