I've never gotten it to work

Agreed. The nine million downloads brag comes from the fact this is one of the oldest plugins for WP, and the fact for some years there wasn’t a useful gallery plugin to rival it.

@joshsmith01, @demonboy: Thanks for taking the time to leave feedback. Just a few thoughts.

First, it sounds like you’ve both had difficulties, and for that I apologize. Indeed, it sounds like neither of you have gotten to a point where you’ve extensively used the plugin.

@joshsmith01 – what PHP errors are you seeing exactly? And you said, you’ve “never gotten it to work.” NGG is obviously working for a large number of people, so if it’s not working “at all” for you, I suspect there’s something unique going on. Can you provide details on what’s not working exactly? I checked for any forum threads from you on it, but I don’t see any.

@demonboy, from your other review, which I just replied to, I took your main issue to be simply that it’s non-intuitive?

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Some responses to your other commentary.

@joshsmith01: on your comment about social media and “finding time to work on the plugin”… we do engage with our user base on social media. We have a person who handles blogging, social media, and other community engagement for us, and he does a great job. We think the time he spends interacting with our community adds value and it doesn’t, obviously, take away from the time our developers have available to spend on NextGEN. We have multiple developers working on NGG full time, and based on that we pushed out as massive an update of the plugin as is possible last August (probably too massive as it turns out); and we’ve released 60+ versions since then between betas and full releases. Those many releases have dramatically stabilized NGG since our major release and resolve almost all commonly experienced issues.

So while I think it’s feasible to object to specific development decisions we’ve made, we’re obviously investing very substantial time in development.

On the download numbers, I’d just want to point out that whether you measure by active user base or new adoption rates, NextGEN continues to be one of the most popular plugins in the WordPress ecosystem. We generally get 100,000 updates the first week following any release, and our steady state download rate is 4-5,000 downloads per day (1.4 – 1.8 million per year). That’s not a historical in any way, that reflects current activity. And neither our active users base or nor our steady state download rates have declined, even following the major bumps with our big release last August.

In any case, we do generally appreciate feedback, positive or otherwise, and I am genuinely disappointed to hear you’re both having difficulties. My sense is some of your comments go beyond your own experiences to draw conclusions either about our team or about the community of NextGEN users that seem rather unwarranted. But we still appreciate you taking the time to add your voices.

The million downloads and good reviews were mainly before Photocrati bought and ruined the plugin. They’re taking credit for something they didn’t do. All the negative feedback, ya, they did that…

@jsowers897: Hi there. Thanks, as always, for taking time to leave your feedback and thoughts.

Just to correct the impression you’re suggesting, however, when we took over management of NextGEN Gallery, it had between 4 and 4.5 million downloads. It’s now about 10.2 million. So the majority of downloads have come since we took over the plugin.

Also, I think we all recognize that the introduction of our major overhaul of NextGEN in August 2013 was bumpy. It did, admittedly, produce a spike of poor reviews. But two further points on that.

First, we managed NextGEN for a year and a half before that overhaul. The version we took over from the previous developer (1.9.3) actually had a lot of issues and broken votes. We incrementally stabilized that version over a year and a half. The last “legacy” version we produced was one of, if not the most stable versions of NextGEN ever. When most people refer or compare us to the “old” version of NGG, they’re ironically comparing us largely against an older version of the plugin we maintained and stabilized.

Second, as for the overhaul itself, while it was indeed bumpy, almost every indicator suggests that it is dramatically stabilized at this point, and that the NGG community is doing quite well. For example:
*Downloads are as high or higher than they’ve ever been
*The active user base is as large as it’s ever been
*Voting is now in line with “legacy” versions
*Support volume in the forums is also now in line “legacy” versions

And just as incremental releases allowed us to bring the legacy version of NGG to some of it’s highest levels of stability and reviews, ongoing incremental releases will allow us to do the same with this version.

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To be clear, I don’t say this to be dismissive of your feedback. You are very welcome to your view of the plugin, and we welcome you expressing that view here in the review section.

But as you’ve moved away from reporting your own experience to trying to make more general statements about the state of the plugin, you’ve unfortunately wandered into factual mis-statements that need to be corrected.

Regardless, I have the impression that you’ve used NGG in the past and aren’t a fan of changes that we’ve made. We’re always genuinely sorry to hear that. We wish you the best in finding an alternative gallery solution. Thanks!