I’ve migrated to Foo Gallery using their Migration plugin, which works very well.
It can replace all the NextGen galleries on all pages using the migration tool.
It also creates gallery web pages with one click.
Change the way images are sorted within your gallery.
By default, they are sorted in the order you see them.
Sorting can be done using drag and drop or any of these properties:
Date created – newest first
Date created – oldest first
Date modified – most recent first
Date modified – most recent last
Title – alphabetically
Title – reverse
Filename – alphabetically
Filename – reverse
Thank you for letting me know. I started looking at other gallery options, in particular FooGallery and Envira Gallery, and will keep them in mind in case we need to change plugins at some point.
I tested the free version of FooGallery by using their gallery import functionality with one NextGen gallery. But every image came in broken. Not sure what the issue was, but didn’t really spend time debugging it.
I haven’t been able to test how well Envira imports galleries from NextGen, as that’s only available in the paid version.
And concerns I have about moving the galleries is every image gets copied from NextGen’s custom storage locations, to the media library. Not only does this double the amount of disk space we’re using for images (already around 50 GB as an estimate), but since the site gets a lot of traffic through image search, I would need to keep all the old images too, to avoid a lot of 404 errors in Google. I guess Google would eventually replace the old image location with the new location, and at that point we could delete all the old images, but with Google there’s no guarantee when that will happen.
One benefit however of using another plugin is since the images are in the media library, it makes it easier to automatically create ALT text for all the images. ShortPixel creates good ALT descriptions automatically, but only in the media library right now, not NextGen galleries.
And for reference Imagely did reply to me by email with the following:
I apologize as currently, there’s no built-in way to change the number of images per page in the new gallery UI. However, this feature would be very useful, and I’ve added your vote to the already existing feature request.
If you’re open to it, you can achieve this with a bit of custom PHP code snippet:
$options = get_option(‘ngg_options’);
$options[‘item_details_per_page’] = 100;
update_option(‘ngg_options’, $options);
You can replace 100 from the code above with any number suitable for your gallery’s image count. This will allow the indicated number of images to display on one page.
To safely add this custom code to your site, I recommend using the WPCode plugin: How to Easily Add Custom Code in WordPress. It keeps your code safe from updates and easy to manage within your WordPress admin area.
I actually added this code as a new custom plugin just so it’s easier to keep track of, and it seems to be working well:
<?php
/*
* Plugin Name: Increase Imagely Image Sorting
*/
$options = get_option('ngg_options');
$options['item_details_per_page'] = 300;
update_option('ngg_options', $options);
?>
