If you are still looking and for anyone else that runs into this situation, I have found a way to show tagged photos in a slideshow that you can place anywhere on either the page or post, whiched worked in my situation and may (or may not) work in yours.
Please excuse the crudeness of this hack since I haven’t had much time to make it user friendly and hopefully over the next week or so I can get this to work with the built in recent and random functions as well.
Anyways, here is what you need to do.
/*– Instructions to add custom slideshow in NextGen Gallery –*/
Open file: ..\plugins\nextgen-galery\xml\imagarotator.php
Add an elseif {} statement under the heading ‘ //get the pictures ‘ that looks something like this:
`elseif ($galleryID == 999) {
$thepictures = nggTags::find_images_for_tags(‘favorite’ , ‘ASC’);
}`
where $galleryID is some arbitrary gallery that is called by either <?php echo nggShowSlideshow(999, width, height) ?>
in a template file or [slideshow id=999]
in a post and ‘favorite’ is the name of the tag that you used on your photos that you want shown in this slideshow(in this case I used favorite).
Hope that helps someone and let me know if anything isn’t clear.