Changing the width of a NextGen image-list gallery

  • Hi;
    I’m fairly new to WordPress and know very little about html coding or website “stuff” in general. I’ve been struggling through learning the WordPress basics for several months, and I am now trying to set up my own artist’s website. After experimenting with a lot of different themes, plugins, etc, I’ve settled on the WPFolio theme and the NextGen image gallery plugin.

    I’m trying to create a portfolio page that simply presents a grid-style display of thumbnails, any of which could be clicked to pop-up and display the full-size image. I’ve figured out how to do this pretty easily by uploading images to a gallery and then inserting it into a page as an image-list gallery, but the one thing that is frustrating me is that I can’t get the grid of thumbnails that appears on the page to span the entire width of the content column, not just be centered in the middle of the column with white margin to the left and right of it. Is it possible to alter the width of the thumbnail gallery to better fill up the column? Changing the thumbnail size or number of columns doesn’t widen the gallery, and I also can’t figure out if this can be done on the plugin stylesheet…I read another forum post that seemed to suggest that the gallery width can only be adjusted by editing the gallery.php file and then re-uploading it via ftp, and I would gladly do this, but I can’t see anywhere in the file that refers to the gallery width anyway.

    I really just want the thumbnail gallery to be 900 pixels wide and 600 high. Is this possible? I created a test gallery on my site just for purposes of illustration:
    https://mattcoors.com/photography

    And here’s a test homepage image that will help illustrate how large I want the gallery layout to be:
    https://mattcoors.com/

    I would really appreciate any help or suggestions.

    Thanks,
    –Matt

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Thread Starter Matt Coors

    (@matt-coors)

    .

    Thread Starter Matt Coors

    (@matt-coors)

    Anybody?

    1. you don’t really need the NextGen Gallery to do what you want to do. I would consider simplifying things.

    With WPFolio the category view will give you a grid of thumbnails for each post.

    2. I suspect you’re creating a page instead of a post. Pages are for things outside of a timeline. Posts are in a timeline. Your work is in a timeline.

    In WPFolio, pages have wider margins to make text more readable.

    Read up on the WPFolio site and follow along the instructions. Once you have your site built you can always modify it. I suspect in an effort to have it “just so” you are stalling out and getting frustrated. Get it up and working, then make improvements. Think about it like working in iterations.

    Thread Starter Matt Coors

    (@matt-coors)

    Hi;
    thanks for the info. I’ve looked at your site quite a bit, actually, so I know there’s a lot of useful stuff there. One of the main reasons I’m interested in using NextGen Gallery is that I don’t like my images opening up in separate pages and I would prefer to incorporate some kind of pop-up. I’ve used NextGen with another site that I work with (that was set up by someone else), so I’m somewhat familiar with creating and maintaining galleries with it. My work isn’t in a timeline. I just want a grid of thumbnails that I can rearrange, caption, and replace whenever necessary; and I don’t want any comments, categories, widgets, or post dates to deal with. I like the simplicity of the popup thumbnail gallery inserted into a page—really I’m just trying to figure out if there’s a way to widen a NextGen image-list gallery to 900 pixels.

    The jquery for native galleries plugin will give you a lightbox effect so images aren’t opening in a separate page.

    I highly recommend using a post instead of a page. It will solve your margin issue for one. It will also automatically put your work in an RSS feed which is helpful. It’s more future proof. It is also how WPFolio is designed to be used. Your work is in a timeline (you made it in a moment in time) as opposed to your bio – which is separate from that timeline, it’s just information about you.

    https://wpfolio.visitsteve.com/wiki/instructions/adding-content#Posts%20Vs.%20Pages

    Categories help organize your site and make it easier to find things.

    If you don’t want comments, turn them off.

    Widgets decrease hassle.

    Inserting a next-gen gallery into a page doesn’t sound so simple based on the fact that you’re having so much trouble. Try using it how it was designed, then changing things once you have it up and running.

    And if you want anything to not appear on the page you can always take it out by creating a child theme and adding some css.

    My point is, try it the way it was designed to work and see how close you get to what you want.

    Last – If you want to override the wide margins on the page you can add a class called .widemargins_override (I think?) to any element but make sure whatever element you add is 900px wide or it will get screwy.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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