If you haven’t gotten this figured out yet, here is a solution as I don’t think there is any way to do this directly within NextGEN.
Create a ‘Page’ with the name of your album as the title.
In the ‘Page’ content put your [album id=18 template=compact].
The [album id=18 template=compact] tag will display the thumbnail for the galleries on the page that people can click through to.
Hope this helps.
