The ‘top rated’ images screen was a bit of a hack as an experiment more than anything. It circumvents some of NGG’s default functionality, and isn’t a good ‘best practice’. It works by first getting the voting results in the correct order, and then fetching the images ‘linked’ to those votes.
The shortcodes that are used to display galleries in your site are controlled by NGG, and they have no connection to the votes. I hook the voting in after all the database stuff is done, and display is just being built.
It really isn’t optimized enough to be able to be used on the front end of a web site.
As I said, I will try ask the NGG devs for a hook, or possible write a function to re-order the image array in the display template itself.