All About Leatherman Tools

One of the things I wanted to add to this blog is an image gallery, specifically for the purpose of uploading multiple images and easily showing them to the visitors of the site.  Turns out that there are a lot of options around this particular excercise but it seemed that one of the most popular was NextGen by Alex Rabe.  You can find it here: Next Gen Gallery.  The forum is pretty extensive and can be found here: Next Gen Gallery Forum. 

So I downloaded the gallery, installed it (combined with the image rotation flash file) and activated it.  Turns out that there are definitely a few things that you have to take into consideration when using this gallery:

1. Prepare your images.  The gallery automaically creates thumbnails for uploaded images but there is limited control over those thumbnails.  The initial batch of images that I uploaded contained images of varying shapes and sizes.  This wasn’t done on purpose, it just happened to be the case.  The generated thumbnails were inconsistent with the uploaded images and cropped the images incorrectly.  I tried to no avail to fix the situation within the gallery, even going so far as posting a message on the forum but it just didn’t work.  The solution as it turns out is to make sure that all of the images uploaded to a particular gallery are pre-configured to be of the same size, the gallery seems to prefer 800×600, although, I’m sure it works for other image sizes provided they are the same for any given gallery.  The second set of images that I uploaded were all 800×600 and the thumbnails worked great.
2. Upload your images.  One of the coolest parts of the gallery is that it lets you upload images in a single zip file and the plugin automatically opens up the zip and grabs the images, this makes it really easy to create libraries and push content.
3. The good thing about this plugin is that it offers a lot of options.
4. The bad thing about this plugin is that there is limited documentation and you’re pretty much on your own to try and figure out everything and how it works for you.

Any additional information / comments / tips about this library would be greatly appreciated.

Tags: Gallery, Images, WordPress Images

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 11:49 pm and is filed under How to Set up a Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.