NextGen is a popular gallery plugin for WordPress that allows you to organize and display photos on your website. NextGen allows you to easily upload your photos and display them in interactive galleries on your website. These galleries can feature rich effects such as image sliders, carousels and other jQuery effects.
Getting Started with NextGen
If you are looking to install NextGen on your WordPress site, you first must search for the plugin through the Directory. Here you can search for and install the NextGen plugin for your website.
Once you have installed NextGen you should see a sidebar in your WordPress admin area that is labeled “Gallery.” This is where the heart of the NextGen WordPress plugin is managed. Once you click on the “Gallery” option, you are ready to add images to your website. Here you can create a new gallery and upload images with ease thanks to the NextGen uploader. You can upload one image at a time or use NextGen’s bulk upload functionality to easily add multiple images to your site. Here you can also edit details about each of your images. Details that you should pay special attention to for SEO purposes include meta tags, alt and title tags.
Integrating Your NextGen Galleries Into Your Website
Now that you have created a NextGen gallery on your site, you are probably wondering how you can get your images to actually show up on your website. With NextGen, displaying your galleries is extremely easy. Simply navigate to the page or post where you are looking to insert your gallery and look at the WordPress WYSIWYG toolbar for the NextGen button. This button will allow you to choose which gallery you want to include and will instantly embed the gallery into the page or post that you are editing in WordPress.
NextGenWordpress Plugin Features
- Uploading Galleries
- NextGen makes it extremely easy to embed your images into your website. You can upload files through a standard WordPress uploading tool or via a zip file upload or even via FTP.
- Managing Your Galleries
- Centralized management: With NextGen you are able to manage all of your galleries from one interface.
- Editing your galleries: NextGen provides a fairly robust set of editing capabilities including changing gallery descriptions, titles, the reordering of images and changing the size of thumbnails.
- Edit individual images: NextGen also allows you to change individual meta tags, title tags as well as the ability to rotate image orientation.
- Watermark management: Easily add watermarks to your existing images to prevent others from stealing your intellectual property.
- Editing thumbnails: Easily change the size of thumbnails as well as batch resize thumbnails across one of more of your galleries.
- Displaying your NextGen Galleries
- Slideshow options: Choose from all sorts of slideshows including different sizes, speed, image order, style of transition and navigation bar.
- Thumbnail display options: Choose from a variety of different display options for your thumbnail galleries.
- Gallery types: Choose between two different types of galleries: thumbnail and slideshow. You can even allow your users to switch between the two while viewing your images.
- Single images: Not only can you display your images as galleries, but NextGen also allows you to display single images if necessary.
6 Reasons Why You Should Use NextGen Gallery
- User friendly site design
It is important to create a website that is interactive and pleasing to the eye. NextGen allows you to easily upload and showcase images on your site in an aesthetically pleasing way. Create stunning galleries that look as if you hired a custom programmer to create smooth transitions as well as lightbox effects.
- Showcase your products
If you are selling a product online, it is important to show your potential customer as much about your product as possible. This often includes multiple angles of your product so that the customer feels as if they can make a decision as to whether or not to make a purchase. The more pictures the better when it comes to offering products online. NextGen allows you to easily create galleries showcasing your products with ease.
- Strong community
NextGen has been the most popular WordPress gallery plugin for a number of years. More than 10 million people have downloaded the NextGen plugin since its inception. With this popularity has come a devout community that is willing to help beginners. Should you have any trouble installing NextGen, you can receive support through online forums or peruse NextGen’s robust documentation archives.
- Third party extensions
Because of the popularity of NextGen, a large number of extensions have been developed that integrate into NextGen. Some of these extensions focus on eCommerce, social media, gallery displays and smart phone integration.
- WordPress widget integration
Adding one of your galleries to the sidebar or home page of your WordPress website is extremely easy through a WordPress widget. You simply drag one of the NextGen widgets onto the portion of your site where you want to display your gallery and NextGen handles the rest. No fancy coding is required to have beautiful galleries sprinkled throughout your website.
- Well maintained
Sometimes with WordPress plugins you have to worry about whether they will be maintained as the plugin becomes more popular. With NextGen you do not have to worry as with over 10 million users, you can be confident that the developers are behind the plugin and will make necessary changes to address bugs and other feature requests. In fact, Photocrati Media recently took over maintenance of the NextGen plugin. Photocrati Media has long been a leader in creating WordPress themes for photographers and artists.
Need Help With Embedding Videos Into Your Website?
In this article we have discussing using NextGen to create image galleries for your site, but you may also be looking for easy ways to integrate video content into your site as well. TikiLIVE offers a WordPress module that allows you to easily display videos on your website without any coding experience. For more information about TikILIVE, contact us today!
