Bad solution for selling images Good for just viewing images

I will give my honest review of a product that has many good features and also a few bad ones. Unfortunately, the bad ones made me realize too late that this was not the correct solution to sell digital downloads for many reasons.

The GOOD:

I first want to say that the plugin has great features too. And support is top-notch. You get answers very quickly to any doubt you might have. Also the different types of galleries are beautifully crafted. And you get a beautiful theme (Imagely), that although not very powerful like the ones we have today like Blocksy , Astra, Avada etc might be enough if you just need to show your images as a simple portfolio.

The BAD:

1- The search engine to find images is just plain horrible. They show every image that has that keyword (tags) or word in a title (if you select title or caption). For example. If you have hundreds of images and you search for an “old car”. You will get results with the word “old” or “car”. Depending what you have on your library you will get: old people, old furniture, old clothes, old maps,….and cars (new ones too) as the query looks for cars and not for images that have both keywords.
You have no option to select that both words have to be present or a NOT order to discard images with a specific keyword. Search is really limited.

2- You are locked into their proprietary folder and gallery structure that is not the one of the Media Folder. This can bring you many problems down the road. If you set your store to sell images with Woocommerce that is a much more robust and flexible solution this one relies on the Media Folder of WordPress. If something goes wrong with Nextgen down the road you are in trouble. If you pick up any solution that works on the Media Library (there are many now) you can simply change it and keep on working.

3- Selling Prints– You are locked into their specific vendors. Nowadays there are much more powerful solutions like Printify, printful etc that can also be adapted later to Etsy,Ebay etc etc.

4- High Resolution images cannot be stored in the cloud. I will store my high resolution files in Google Drive and will deliver every time a customer purchases one. When you have thousands of images that weight between 15 and 25 MB you better have it not in your hosting server, specially if you have a shared hosting or virtual one as your hosting price would become quickly very expensive and also slow down your website in general.

So would I recommend this products? Maybe. If you want a portfolio for your images the galleries are beautiful, fast to arrange, if you have any problems support will give you proper help in a timely manner.

If you want to sell images or print them, I would not go that route today. That has been a mistake, and I thought that going to a more basic solution than WooCommerce would help me to reach the same results with less cost and faster. I was completely wrong, and I would recommend that if you are serious about selling downloads and or prints you will have to look at WooCommerce that is more expensive once you have all the needed plugins and has a steeper learning curve but is much much more flexible and is not limited by the points I pointed before.