InfernoWRX

Hi Cais,
Thanks for reaching out and engaging in feedback. After reviewing my comment, first off I apologize as it comes off heavy on the hater-rant side of things; not a good tone for constructive criticism. –My bad–
Being new to WP, I was just frustrated with the UI and ultimately disappointed in the end results. Also looking back at the user comments in the ET blog post, it does make sense that NextGEN is better suited for power users and photographers. For me, simple sliders fit the bill rather than a full-featured lightbox.

To elaborate on the “page reloads”: when testing the NextGEN gallery and selecting the “back” or “next” buttons, literally the entire page blinks and reloads instead of just shifting to the next image. This is a huge disruption for the user; I’ve tried it on three different browsers with the same results. In fact, the whole url changes. 🙁 Sad. Not sure why it’s doing this but I can’t spend time debugging this hiccup, while other quicker solutions are out there.

A test page is setup between Meta Slider and NextGEN for comparison, and to view the page reload wonkiness: http://designramblings.com/gallery-comparison/
Also, I liked how MS kept the caption styling from the theme and overall visual tightness. As default, they didn’t include the image title (this would be yet another added step via NextGEN to clear that field).

I wanted to be honest that I gave NextGEN a fair shot but unfortunately, it didn’t work out for my needs. Please feel free to reach out if you want to discuss further…

Thanks and best regards…