NextGEN Gallery Is easily the most popular image gallery plugin available for WordPress… and with good reason. The plugin provides a comprehensive interface for managing images arranged into Albums (a collection of galleries), and Galleries (a collection of images) for easy, logical image collection management. Grouping galleries into albums allows for a nice, top-level sorting of similar images—so that, for example—you can have an album for different artists, with galleries sorted into categories like landscape, portrait, etc. (Or vice-versa—with albums for subjects and galleries for artists depicting those subjects. the possibilities are endless).
Once you have your images loaded and organized, the plugin provides options for how gallery pages appear—how many images on a page, size of the thumbnails, and whether the gallery will display in a grid, a slideshow, or both. You can place images from your NexGen collections as galleries, or as single images on a page or post. You can see samples of NexGen galleries in our Portfolio section of this site.
The real power and beauty of NexGen Gallery is the sophisticated way that it presents images from your collections. Click on any thumbnail or “Singlepic” image from a NexGen album, and it expands to full size without navigating away from the page, and “ghosts’ the rest of the page to highlight your image. And if the enlarged image is from a gallery of thumbnails, the enlarged image will display a “Previous” & “Next” link to view more images on the page. To see an example of this image enlargement model, just click on the “Hot/Cool Plugin” graphic at the top-right of this article. A second click—anywhere on the screen—exits the enlargement and returns you to normal browsing.
The plugin also includes a sidebar widget that will display a slideshow from selected albums/galleries (see a sample slideshow in the sidebar of our demo Preview site).
The administrative interface provide a wealth of options for organizing, tagging, watermarking your images, and more:
- Specify a description for each image. This text can be displayed under thumbnails as well as in slideshows.
- Specify alternate title text for each image.
- Exclude images from being displayed on gallery pages.
- Specify tags for images. Specifying a tag allows it to be displayed as a related image for posts that use the same value for its category or tag.
- Set a watermark on selected images.
- Generate (create) new thumbnails for selected images. This is especially useful when you change the thumbnail options.
- Resize images. This is useful when you set resize parameters on the Images option page.
- Import metadata (e.g. EXIF, IPTC, or XMP data) from images and set it in the alternate title text field.
- Edit the name and description of the gallery.
- Specify a preview image that will be displayed to represent a gallery.
NexGen Gallery is the perfect plugin for anyone who wants to display lots of images and show them to their best advantage. It’s a natural for artists and photographers. But it’s also a great choice for anyone who has a lot of products to show in an online store.
Learn more at the NextGEN Gallery home page, or on the WordPress.com Plugin page
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