NGG Image Rotation

I have a client with a Flash based gallery that presents difficulties: it is hard to maintain, loads slowly, and Apple products cannot display the gallery properly.

NextGEN Gallery for WordPress seemed like a good option, but the interface was not up to her standards. It looks too much like a blog were her exact words.

Instead of a list of thumbnails, she wanted a large image with thumbnails at the bottom. Click the thumbnail, and it updates the large image. She has 200+ images in the gallery.

I found the nggGalleryView plugin which looks like what was desired. The thumbnails were a little small, but I was able to modify that with CSS. The image was resized in an odd way resulting in low image quality. The wrong CSS was in place, which I was able to correct.

The main problem with nggGalleryView is that it loads all the images at one time. So, if there is a gallery with 200+ images it slows down the browser with the sheer volume of information that it is processing all at one time.

[nggallery id=x template=carousel images=7]

The problem with this is there is no AJAX. In essence, every time you click to do something, the page reloads.

This is a custom module to extend NextGEN Gallery with a custom view that places the thumbnails in the left column, places a large image in the right column, and updates the large image with AJAX.

Usage: [nggallery id=1 template=”imagerotation”]