After much searching for a good gallery/image-display WordPress plugin for portfolios, the best free contender was NextGen Gallery, but to get anywhere near what I wanted I had to have a variety of other plugins…

NextGen Gallery - nice display of images/gallery and slideshow (using an old version of ImageRotator) - this is fine if you want the basics, anything more and you have to get your hands dirty or look elsewhere. Good backend management and organisation of images, quite a few plugins support it and it’s well written and easy to understand the code (if that floats your boat)

JW ImageRotator - Used for the changing images

Lightview - The nice JavaScript animation of images showing full browser screen

Lightview Plus - The piece of code that sits between NextGen Gallery and Lightview

I also tried SimpleViewer which required the bit in-between nggSimpleViewer, but this no longer works with WordPress 2.5 and isn’t supported. Doh! In fact a lot of the above are difficult to get help on, as there’s no forums active and minimal documentation.

All the above plugins work fine standalone, but trying to integrate the lot meant lots of digging into the code, trial and error and wishing I’d written it from scratch. There are still some minor bugs, but it now works as I want it…

  • The ImageRotator links to Lightview when clicked
  • The NextGen gallery can be hidden and Lightview still works (Lightview requires the gallery)
  • Both the ImageRotator and NextGen display different images once clicked instead of the same, larger version
  • ImageRotator contains more information about the gallery and images
  • And finally customising the interface, titles and captions for both versions of Lightview

Lightview, NextGen and ImageRotator are great pieces of software and kudos to the developers. Although everything would have been far smoother with decent documentation or reading how others have solved these issues probably countless times.