Singlpic Size in the Nextgen Plugin is Too Small

This is kind of a theoretical question, I suppose.

I was struggling with images in WordPress. There just didn’t seem to be any way to do even the simplest thing with images that I wanted to do. Then I came across the Nextgen plugin.

In many ways, it is exactly what I was looking for. It does what to me is an obvious thing: It simply puts uploaded images into galleries, which you can then manipulate and insert in posts and pages. The images are presented in a lightbox style, which I like. Then you can insert single images from these galleries into your posts. It seems like it is superior in every way to the standard image processing and manipulating in just the bare WordPress.

However, and this is a big however, I went to insert a single image from one of my new Nextgen galleries and I only have three size options:

Thumbnail, Full Size, and Singlpic.

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw that those were my only three options. Thumbnail is obviously too small. Full size is too big. And Singlpic is 320 X 240 pixels, again too small.

I assumed there was a default setting somewhere where I could change the Singlpic size, or, better yet, have a whole range of options for Singlpic size, but I couldn’t find anything.

So this makes me wonder why someone would create such a brilliant plugin as Nextgen and then only give you these three options when it comes to inserting an image?

Compare it to the basic system within WordPress, which I thought this plugin could replace. It offers Thumbnail, Medium, Large, and Full Size. Then once the image is inserted, you can reize it by percentage (100%, 90%, 80%, 70%, 60% etc.). And if that doesn’t do it for you, you can go to the Advanced tab and choose the exact pixel size for the image.

And that’s just the default system within WordPress. The designers of Nextgen obviously wanted to offer something that was much better than the default system. And in most ways, Nextgen is superior. Yet, at the final stage – the most important stage – the inserting of the image into a post – it drops the ball and offers essentially just one size: 320 X 240.

That one limitation almost makes the plugin useless to me. Why wouldn’t the makers of Nextgen at least give you the same level of size choices as you get with the basic WordPress install?

I know that if you use the Nextgen button on the Toolbar, you get a nifty little menu where you can manually select the pixel size of the single image you want to insert. However, then you have to do the math to figure out how much to change each dimension to keep the ratio correct. And you have to do this for every single picture every single time. And, much worse, in this menu there are suddenly no thumbnails of the pictures. So how can you choose which picture to insert?

So that’s my question: Why doesn’t the Nextgen plugin offer different sizes for inserting single images?

I can’t even imagine the technical know-how that goes into writing a plugin like that. So I appreciate the skill and hard work and intelligence that goes into making a plugin like Nextgen. I couldn’t do it in a thousand years. So is there a technical reason why it’s impossible to include different size options in the plugin? Or did the creators for reasons I can’t imagine just decide that after doing all that work, no one would want their pictures to be different sizes?