Brave attempt, but way too complex

Hi, thanks for your detailed review. It surprises me you say it needs a knowledge of coding to do tweakings, I really can’t understand what you mean. What tweaks? It’s true that there are some variables involved in the process of the layout building but it’s just the beauty of this plugin, i.e. the ability to build galleries with a layout that break the boredom of the classical multi-column or multi-row layouts.

Unless you’re a web developer, I challenge you to build a photogallery exactly as you want. I mean, not that kind of galleries I said before, made just of columns or rows.

Final Tiles Gallery gives a chance to make something different and if you understand how it works (come on, it’s not so hard) you can reach the result you have in mind, but if you don’t get the behavior it’s not that trouble, you can get interesting layouts anyway.

About the “strange” points:

– yes, it depends by the “Grid size” parameter: consider it like a snapping grid, the exceeding parts are cropped. If the “Grid size” is 50px and an image is 200×310 than the final size will be 200×300 this is done to increase the chance of alignments;

– actually you can do it, it’s not that easy but it’s not so important (in my opinion)

– I’ve never received a report for “misterious orders”, actually it’s quite thorough. could you be more precise?

– well, the lightboxes are third party but also in this case I’ve never received reports about slow lightboxes.

Thanks for your response.
Maybe you can take a look at a gallery I now have (here), made with Slim Jetpack. Image sizes are evenly distributed but it still has masonry tiles, adjustments of cropping are hardly noticeable and when rescaled the relative sizes stay intact- it was made in minutes. I didn’t succeed in getting a comparable result with the same images in Final Tiles, not even after 2 hours of work (two of these gallery tests can be seen here). Every attempt ended up with small (and less important) images becoming oversized compared to more important (higher res) images, and still columns rather than masonry tiles. I still don’t understand what determins the relative size of the images.

The lightbox I now use (Lightbox Plus Colorbox) is much quicker (times can be set) and more stable. I also didn’t succeed, by the way, in coupling that lightbox to the Final Tiles gallery, it just wouldn’t work.

But (sadly) true: my Slim JP gallery now lacks the beautiful detail in responsiveness that Final Tiles offers. That’s why I gave Final Tiles a try (and hope for improvements in the future).

I used images of very different sizes and aspect ratios, like from 1024×325 to almost square 435×453, a mix of (very) rectangular, square, portrait, landscape, small and big. And: my max content width is quite narrow: 560 px. Maybe results with Final Tiles would’ve been better with a larger number of images that all have the same aspect ratio, used in a wider content width?

Apart from some undesired technical effects of changing settings (small images becoming big and unsharp, extreme cropping, columns instead of tiles), maybe I just want something different from a gallery, especially in this case: at least some control over which images are visually more important than others. Final Tiles seems a bit random in its size ordering: part of the charm but not what I need right now. Part of the annoyance is that the settings pretend to give you lots of control, while in fact there’s only little that you really have control over.

I’ve seen galleries (custom made or paid plugins) that reorder and rescale the gallery but still keep the size hierarchy and masonry style intact. That’s what I also expected from Final Tiles at first. Now I think that Final Tiles was designed with something else in mind.

So, Final Tiles could work for some people, but (as I said before) it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea.