Dynamic Gallery build

Hi everyone and thanks in advance for any help with this. I am newer to WordPress, but have a lot of PHP experience.

Currently I have setup Nextgen gallery plugin which takes short-tags like the following:

[gallery album=x template=x]

I have written a short-code function that generates the above tags (multiple) from the albums in the database and replaces “[the-gallery]” with for example:

[album id=1 template=compact]
[album id=2 template=compact]

I use “add_shortcode( ‘the-gallery’, ‘build_gallery’ );” before the loop and it does do what its supposed to except for the fact that it shows the actual tags in the page and Nextgen is NOT turning the above album tags into actual photos.

I think I need to somehow re-run the nextgen plugin on the content after my short-tag is executed. Is this correct? How does one do this?

Thanks again!