[Plugin: NextGEN Gallery] Blank Spaces in Slideshow Thumbnail Display

Further Info: I have 38 slideshows in Nextgen on a photo-blog, and all 38 have blank “holes” in the thumbnail display matrix. At this link is a typical example of what I mean. See the bottom of the page where the thumbnails are displayed.

https://www.worldtravelreports.org/south-africa-gallery-listing/kruger-park

I had that same problem. I noticed that if I switched to the Default template that the problem was gone. And the Default theme had a more narrow page area than my theme. Long story short: change the thumbnail widths under Gallery –> Options –> Thumbnails. (The magic number for me was 135×135. If I went any bigger, I’d get those blank spaces.) Then recreate the thumbnails under Gallery –> Manage Gallery –> Edit your gallery. In there, there is an option to recreate all your thumbnails. It really is a fabulous plugin!

Thanks for the input Shanaya. I tried what you said with no luck. My max thumbnail size was only 120×84 to start with (I use only landscape orientation for my gallery photos). I tried 120×120 square, and I tried deleting the thumbs directory in one of the galleries under wp-content, then recreating the thumbs, but if anything I created more blank spaces than I had. I haven’t tried the extreme case of starting from scratch and deleting all of the photos (jpg files) from the gallery, then uploading them again using FTP, because of the work involved. I have 2000 5-megapixel photos in my galleries. Maybe I will try this on one of the smaller galleries to see if it does any good. When I create a new gallery and upload photos into it I don’t have any problem (no blank spaces between thumbnails), but when I start modifying the sort order and deleting and adding photos, blank spaces start appearing. As I said above, the blank spaces do not seem to affect the slide show … it is purely a cosmetic effect.

I finally found an excellent solution to this problem of blank spaces in the thumbnail display that was posted 7 months ago by Bee Dudler (in July 08). This may help others to find it. It is a simple but effective solution that adds a height:xxx px parameter to the ngg-gallery-thumbnail-box section of nggallery.css. Bee Dudler recommended 310px for the value of xxx for the spacing height between thumbnail rows, but 150px still got rid of all my blank spaces and looked a little better than 310px. Just add the height parameter (height:150px;) to the particular css file that you are using (I was using the default nggallery.css) and use the value that looks best for you when your matrix of thumbnails is displayed. See the original posting for more discussion.
Harringtondl