Please note: The following was written for NextGen version 0.99.1 and Wordpress 2.6.3. Depending on your version of NextGen and/or Wordpress, there may be slight to significant variances.

I have noticed that there’s a lack of clear documentation for the NextGEN photo gallery plugin for Wordpress.  The programmer doesn’t have time to write anything clear in English, especially when English is not his native language.

After seeing a lot of hits to this site for my earlier post about a NextGEN random image tweak, I figured it would be helpful to write a quick guide about how to set up a Photo Album page and add galleries and photos using the NextGEN plugin.

First, you have to download, extract and upload the NextGEN files to your Wordpress plugins directory.  Second, activate this plugin.

Now, in order to use the plugin, you need to understand how it is organized.  In NextGEN, an “album” is a container for a “gallery.”  An album can contain one or more galleries.

A gallery is a container for your photos.  For most people, you would only need to create one album.  You’ll probably create a lot of different galleries and put it in that album.  Maybe if you have a site that has different sections or authors, you might create multiple albums such as “Kelly’s Photos,” “Mike’s Photos,” “Holly’s Photos,” etc., but for most people, one album is enough.

So after activating your plugin, you’ll want to create your album.  You should have a new option in your main admin menu (after Write, Manage, Design, Comments, etc.) called Gallery.  This is where you go to set up and manage your NextGEN plugin.

Go there, click on “Album” and add a new album.  Click update.  If this is the first album you’ve created, your album ID is 1.  If not, you can get your album ID by selecting it from the dropdown.  The page will update to show your album ID.

Now, create a new Wordpress page that will display this album.  Call this page something like “Photos” or “Album.”  Depending on your Wordpress theme, it should show up in your navigation or where ever your page listings show up.  I called mine “Photo Gallery” though this is the opposite of how NextGEN is organized (in my head, a gallery should be a collection of albums, but NextGEN has it the other way around with an album being a collection of galleries, anyway…)

In the HTML editor for this new page put [album=#,compact] OR [album=#,extended].  Of course, replace # with the actual number that corresponds to your album ID.  The difference between the compact style or the extended style can be seen here. Ignore the code they give you on that page; it seems to be for an earlier version of the plugin.  My main photos page uses the compact style.

Once you have created this Album page, it’s time to put some photo sets, aka galleries, into it.  Go back to the NextGEN administration menu and click on “Add Gallery.”  Give a name for your gallery and click Add gallery.  The name doesn’t have to be anything fancy because you can control the actual name people will see later. You can’t put any space in the name, but if you do they will be turned into hyphens.

After you’ve added the gallery, you get 3 options on how to add pictures to the gallery.  The “Upload a Zip-File” option has been buggy for me, and the “Upload Images” option takes too long.  What I like to do is upload the photos I want using FTP.  After you gave the gallery a name, a new folder was automatically created for it on your server.  Connect using your FTP program and upload your photos into wp-content/gallery/your-new-gallery-name/ (ignore the thumbs folder). Then click the “Import Image Folder” option in the NextGEN administration.  Make sure to update the page with the name of your new gallery followed by a trailing forward slash (/) so it looks like wp-content/gallery/your-new-gallery-name/ and you can leave the box checked or unchecked depending on whether or not you want to import the details about when the photo was taken, lighting conditions, camera model, etc.

Once you’ve imported your photos, click on “Manage Gallery.”   Under the Action column, click on “Edit” for the gallery you just created.  Here, you can give a name and description for your gallery.  The name is what your site visitors will see, and if you had chosen the extended style, they will also see the description.

Then for the “Create New Page” dropdown select the name of your Wordpress Album page that you created earlier and click on “Add page.”  What this will do is automatically create a child page under your Album page containing this gallery.  If for some reason you don’t want this gallery to be a child of your Album page, you can create it as a child of any of your other existing pages or have it be a main page on its own.

Once you click “Add page,” the “Page Link to” will automatically update.  The other thing you want to do here is select a “Preview image” which will be your gallery cover.  Don’t forget to click “Save Changes” if you do so.

Optionally, you can give each photo a description (will show up as a “caption” for each photo), title and alt text, and tags.  Again, don’t forget to click “Save Changes.”

The final step is to have this new gallery you just created, full with photos, to show up on your Wordpress Album page (you may not always want this if you want to keep this gallery hidden or have it manually show up somewhere else).  In the NextGEN administration area, click on “Album” and select your album from the dropdown.  Once you do so, you can drag and drop your gallery from the right into the album on the left.   Click “Update” once you are done.  Now this gallery will show up on your Album page.  Visit your Wordpress Album page to see the changes.

If you want to display a gallery within a post, simply get the gallery ID of that gallery (visible on the Manage Gallery page in the administration area) and add the code [gallery=#] to the HTML editor of the post.  For example, you can create a gallery of photos from a party, optionally have it show up on your Album page or not, and then write a post about the party and embed the gallery right in that post with the [gallery=#] code.

Coming soon, I’ll write something about displaying a small gallery of random or recent photos from our NextGEN in your sidebar or anywhere else in your Wordpress theme.

Here’s a diagram of the basic NextGEN structure:

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