>> From time to time pictures are added to existing galleries, but finding
>> them is a test of patience. The ID can be found out quickly, but no
>> IDs are displayed under Add images.
As a fellow user, not sure what you’re struggling with…if you add to gallery X, and go to gallery X, the photos are listed clearly in the order they were added (depending on your sort order set, could be last ones added). Alternatively, assuming you put in some meta data for file names or descriptions, if you go to Manage Galleries, the first field lets you search for photos, the second lets you search galleries.
>> It is also not possible to sort logically in alphabetical order here
>> and if you have created 100+ galleries with the letter B, have fun
>> pressing B. Under Manage Galleries, you can quickly find the gallery
>> you want, as the ID (example 158) can be seen in your own post. Only
>> here there is no image upload.
If I understand you correctly, you mean there is no “sortable” gallery list in the upload selection as it goes in the order it was created? I have a fair number of galleries, and have never found that to be a problem, but I believe there is some code in the previous support areas to let you change the sort order of that list.
>> I thought Nextgen was for professional photographers? The backend, i.e.
>> the interface for the admin, doesn’t feel user-friendly or intuitive.
>> Maybe someone knows a faster solution to add new recordings to an
>> existing gallery (without laborious searching)? If not, are you
>> satisfied with this backend? Thanks for reading and best regards Michael
The back end does take a bit of getting used to, imo. Being able to jump from “Manage a Gallery” directly to upload would be a nice touch, with the gallery already selected, agreed. However, as for “professional” management, the benefits of NextGen are likely evident in the 800K+ users.
In addition to robust galleries out of the box, the biggest selling feature of all of it is that your photos are not all co-mingled with your media library. While I’m not a professional photographer, I am anal-retentive when it comes to file structures, organizing principles, etc. So I tried a ton of different galleries, and some were a bit more user friendly in area A or B, but then when it came time to do behind the scenes file management, they threw everything into the media library that has no built-in file structure. Plugins like Media Library Assistant help with that, but there are some people running sites with 100K+ pictures. You don’t really want all of those in media library. NGG lets you separate them out which many prof photographers prefer. Others, who might only have some samples up on their site, perhaps 100-200 shots, can use pretty much anything that looks nice, and will often go with cuter layouts or theme integrations.
I have only two functional laments…first is that not all apps use the same nomenclature. ?? I drove myself bonkers considering about 20 different galleries, some of which had “albums” as bigger than “galleries”, and “galleries” bigger than collections, while others use albums and galleries interchangeably and others had only one level, while others still had collections as the smallest. In my mind, I see collections as the biggest, galleries as the middle, and albums would be the smallest. So I might have a Wedding Collection, a series of galleries for different events, and albums within that which are the Mother’s Album, the Bride’s Album, etc. Matching closer to the physical world. So for me, I always think galleries should be bigger than albums even for NGG.
Second, I think we should be able to turn “off” recursive galleries…if you go to album 1, and it has 3 galleries in it, if you go to the album page (in live mode) there will be three galleries listed. The first one would be Gall 1, for example. If someone clicks on that gallery, one of two things happens — if the sub-gallery has a page predefined, it will go to that page (say domain/album/gall1). If no page is built, or pre-assigned, it it generates one with the default gallery layout with an address such as domain/album/ngg/gall1. It’s not a “real” page, it is temporarily generated. While that sounds awesome, a generated recursive function, i.e. set up the first page and everything under that will be generated automatically, you can even link to those fake page URLs, there’s also a cost. You can’t turn it off. Why would you want to? In my case, I have a few galleries that I would like to “lock” with a password. For example, if I was doing wedding photos, I’d like to post Bride #1’s gallery, put it on a page, add a password, and bam, that page is lightly protected enough for just them. BUT anyone who knows WP and knows NGG knows that if they just type in domain/album/NGG/Gall1, it will bypass any page I’ve created, thus bypassing the private/pwd requirement, and generate the page. You can’t lock THAT page because it doesn’t really exist, so there is no place to add your security requirements. But, as I said, you can’t turn it off. I was on a prof photographer’s site the one time, I went to go into their gallery, got asked for a pwd, looked at their structure, typed the workaround, and bam, I was in. 10s and I totally defeated the security, which is not secure anyway, just a false sense of comfort. But it would be enough for most people looking at wedding photos, for example. Similarly for people doing kids photos, they don’t want all of them available to just anyone. But there isn’t a work around for that. I’d like to just disable the recursive function but you can’t. You can make it hard to FIGURE out, but not quite the same…
Otherwise, all the trade-offs are worth it not to have 20K images roaming around my media library ??
