Official support might have a better way to explain this, but as a fellow user, AFAIK, the short answer is no, no, no, and yes (sort of). ??
The first no is that a gallery doesn’t actually “exist” — it’s generated each time you load the page. It doesn’t exist as a standalone gallery, hence you can’t “view” it in edit mode, only once you load the page.
The second no is almost identical, but more in comparison to other things you upload. If you upload in media library or a file for downloading, WP stores all of those uploads as “Custom Post Types”. Which means you can link to them individually, see them like a post, they have their own visible “entity” to link to. NGG doesn’t do that — it uploads to a separate directory so as not to clutter up your media library AND doesn’t create a bunch of custom post types. So again, the gallery doesn’t “exist” that way.
The third no is that to display a gallery, you also need to tell it (a) which gallery, (b) which layout, (c) which settings, (d) sort order, and (e) which images to include or exclude. All of those are set in the block when you create it in a page or post. So you can’t tell it to display a gallery with a simple URL because none of those features would be specified.
The fourth “yes (sort of)” is a bit more complicated and depends on how you have set up your gallery. If you create an album (call it Master), and create three galleries (called G1, G2, G3), AND make sure that breadcrumbs are showing AND do NOT specify a page for the galleries, you CAN do a single page that stores the Album Master. When you load THAT page, it will give you the links for the three Galleries (G1, G2, G3) from it. Even though they don’t have actual pages, if you click on them, it WILL use the Album settings (i.e. the missing information you didn’t have in #3 above) to generate a subpage with G1 or G2 or G3. In effect, you ARE loading G1, G2, G3, without creating a page, but you are doing it because it basically uses the Master Page and shows G1 / G2 / G3 in it with the same settings. You could try to use THOSE links to put in your table, but I don’t know if it will work. Regardless, you would need to create at least ONE page. However, it would be VERY difficult in that table to show anything other than the link i.e. preview a photo or anything, except entirely manually.
For example, I have an album called Admin. It has no “page” associated with it, but I created one to test it (i.e., https://www.mydomain.com/admintest). It has about 15 galleries in it, none of which have pages, they just exist. If I click on one, and I have breadcrumbs enabled, it creates a pseudo “gallery URL” of:
https://www.mydomain.com/admintest/nggallery/admin/test-area
where:
mydomain.com — obvious
admintest — name of the master page
nggallery — telling it that it is part of NGG generation
admin — the name of the master album (i.e. “Master”)
test-area — the name of the gallery (i.e. G1)
So you CAN do it, BUT you have to have at least one page somewhere, and a master Album that it can be under, AND the NGGALLERY part will always be there, along with the main page and album name).
As I said, official support can give you a better explanation, or perhaps find ways to shorten that list. Obviously if you named your master page something like “photos” and your album something like “album”, you could generate a more palatable version of the URL:
https://www.mydomain.com/photos/nggallery/album/G1
Paul
aka PolyWogg
