NextGEN Gallery setup - all albums within 1 album

I recently came to a problem when releasing the new format of our graffiti gallery, which is using the famous NextGEN Gallery by Alex Rabe.

I had 216 galleries sorted into 12 albums. I needed to place all albums on one page and from there the user should have gone to the specific album including it’s own galleries.

I searched on WP forums, Alex’s site but I couldn’t find anything of use so when I figured out how to do it I decided to publish this post. Maybe someone will find it useful in the future ;) I also took some screenshots to demonstrate how I accomplished it.

1st step
All albums are on the right side. There you can see is an album called Albums (ID: 4).
2nd step
Place it inside a new page using the gallery specific code [album=4,compact] (called Graffiti Gallery in my case).
3rd step
Select the album called Albums from the dropdown menu in the top left. When the page loads drag all albums on the right side in this Albums album (of course except Albums). This way you will have all your albums inside a single album which will be displayed on the main page of your site’s gallery (on the page that you previously created).
4th step
You can add your galleries in the album you desire.

Now this is very important: EACH gallery and EACH album that you create HAS TO HAVE a page of it’s own so that the actual link in the site to work.

You can see in the last image that you have to go to ” Create new page:” section. Then you select what parent should that gallery page have and push Add page. There you go … the links will now point to that specific gallery and not the main page.

I hope you all understood what I tried to explain. I’m not such a good teacher :P
Let me know if you have any questions or if you need my help by commenting right here on this page.

24 martie 2010|internet|26 Comments

26 Comments

Andy 29 aprilie 2010 la 21:59 - Raspunde

Hi, how did you get your albums to be pages?
Alex Mielus 29 aprilie 2010 la 22:12 - Raspunde

Andy in EACH gallery management page, in your admin, you will see a field called „Create new page:” and a button called „Add Page”. You'll see you even have the pages tree so you can place your galleries on their right spot.

For albums on the other hand you have to create a page for each of them.
Create a new page and write something like: [album=album's_ID, compact] where album's_ID is the actual album's ID.
JacobOB 25 iulie 2010 la 5:08 - Raspunde

Fantastic post, thank you so much for sharing
Alex Mielus 25 iulie 2010 la 9:36 - Raspunde

Jacob I'm glad some people find it useful ;)
Mlabatore 4 august 2010 la 2:30 - Raspunde

Ok… so I liked your site and and trying to do something similiar to my blog with nextgen. I almost have it working except for the galleries linking. I am missing something here…

When you are on the Gallery Page and you select your gallery… are you creating the pages before or after? meaning the subpages… if i select after, then I have 2 pages if i hit the create new page. maybe i'm a bit confused…

also, in my tree that says CREATE NEW PAGE, it also shows all my old deleted pages… maybe a NextGEN bug? if not, I dunno how to fix it and only show my current pages. Right now my Pages Tree looks like a mess….
Alex Mielus 4 august 2010 la 11:00 - Raspunde

Hello Mlabatore,

Let's say that you select a gallery named „My gallery”.

Do you see on the „Page Link to:” field some pages or a tree of pages? If you see them then select „My gallery” and then „Save changes”.

If you don't see this page then just go to „Create new page:” field select where „My gallery” should be in the tree (on „Main page (No Parent)” or some other page that you have). Push „Add Page” and that's it.

„all my old deleted pages” you say. Those are all pages from /wp-admin/edit.php?post_type=page. NextGen shows them there. So I don't think you deleted them :) If you still want to delete them go to /wp-admin/edit.php?post_type=page and just delete them from there first.

I created the subpages AFTER I created the main gallery page. Something like this. I created the main continent pages (Europe, Asia). Then countries pages (Romania, France, UK, Japan …) and after that cities pages.

So the pages tree looks like this:

Europe
   – Romania
      – Bucharest
      – Timisoara
      – Baia Mare
   – France
      – Paris
   – UK
      – London
      – Banksy
Asia
   – Japan
      – Tokyo
   – China
   – Vietnam
Mlabatore 4 august 2010 la 12:32 - Raspunde

Alex,

Thanks for the quick reply… but it still doesn't work :( My subpages (for the galleries) are not linking correctly, even though I am doing it exactly as you say.

And I again maybe it has to do with the deleted pages. They are definately deleted and not showing at:

/wp-admin/edit.php?post_type=page

but they are definately still listed in my NextGEN Admin panel. In fact, no matter what page I delete from my site, they ALWAYS show up in NextGEN. Unless there is a permanently delete button I don't see..

Send me a private email and I'll let you login to my site and check it out to see if I am just making a mistake somewhere.

Thanks again for the quick response…
Julie Russell 5 februarie 2011 la 13:38 - Raspunde

I’ve been building sites with WordPress and NextGEN for a while. I couldn’t have done my current one artolympix.com with 860+ images in 330+ galleries in 40+ albums without your brilliant solution! The site will be launched by the end of February.
Alex Mielus 5 februarie 2011 la 13:48 - Raspunde

Julie I’m so happy people are finding this and use it to complete their sites!

Good luck on your future projects.
Driscoll 9 februarie 2011 la 20:54 - Raspunde

Alex,

Your page is very helpful!

I have created an album called portfolio, and it houses my two other albums Theatre and Dance.

Everything is working great except…. on the Portfolio Page my thumbnails are not loading?

Any thing you can think of?

-D
Alex Mielus 10 februarie 2011 la 12:11 - Raspunde

@Driscoll: I see the thumbnails are loading just fine on http://lonestarnyc.com/wordpress/?page_id=186 . What was the problem? Didn’t you set them up in gallery’s page? Am I right? :)
Driscoll 10 februarie 2011 la 15:18 - Raspunde

Alex,
The problem isn’t with the thumbnails.
My problem is that if I click on portfolio, then click on theatre, then click on a show, I am in a subpage of Theatre and not in the page that should have been created for that show.

if you pick a show out of the subpage it will lead you to the page I created for that show.
ex. http://lonestarnyc.com/wordpress/?page_id=298

If you click portfolio, theatre, plays, A Raisin in the sun
you get all the images, but none of the show info (director producer etc….)
ex. http://lonestarnyc.com/wordpress/?page_id=255&album=5&gallery=20

I want to have the show page load with every path you take to get to that show, but I am not sure how to do that unless I start taking galleries out of albums and make pages with all the theatre shows and not sub-category them

Thanks,
Driscoll
Alex Mielus 10 februarie 2011 la 15:46 - Raspunde

Have you tried in „Gallery settings” -> „Gallery” to switch the „Deactivate gallery page link” ?
Jernej 28 februarie 2011 la 13:03 - Raspunde

How did you solve the problem of thumbnails not displaying in the „Album of Albums” page?

I have a similar situation as yourself… top level album (Gallery) with many nested albums (…2009, 2010, 2011…) which in turn have nested galleries. The problem I cannot seem to solve is that on that top level album NGG simply doesn’t display thumbnails. Individual albums don’t have that problem (2010 for example will show thumbnails for each nested gallery) but there are no thumbnails for 2010 in the top level album. It’s been seriously irritating as I can’t find a solution and without it the whole thing just looks horribly wrong.
Alex Mielus 1 martie 2011 la 19:25 - Raspunde

Jernej on this page ./wp-admin/admin.php?page=nggallery-manage-album when you select an album from the „Select album” top left drop down menu you can then „Edit Album”.

In the thickbox-like screen you have „Album name:” / „Album description:” / „Select a preview image:” / „Page Link to”
Just select a preview image then „OK” and that’s it :)

Let me know if it works out for you.
Jernej 3 martie 2011 la 5:10 - Raspunde

Thanks, it sort of works. For some reason I can only choose from a small selection of images rather than what would actually be appropriate for a particular album.

NGG’s been driving me nuts with some of its functionality. For example I haven’t seen that album edit button before, the slideshow features are horrible etc. Still… I haven’t found anything better yet.
Steve Crooks 18 aprilie 2011 la 0:07 - Raspunde

Well done Alex – that was a great help – thanks a lot
Alexandru Mieluş 18 aprilie 2011 la 8:51 - Raspunde

Thank you Steve! I am glad some people find it useful ;)
amber 27 august 2011 la 0:03 - Raspunde

THANK YOU!!! THANK YOU!!! THANK YOU!!!
Rizwan Tarar 23 septembrie 2011 la 11:43 - Raspunde

thnks it works for me too
Gilbert 8 martie 2012 la 16:49 - Raspunde

Hi,

I have created a main album and dragged in it the sub albums which have galleries in it. Then I created a page with the main album inserted as well as the sub page with the sub album and gallery pages. so all albums and galleries have a page. however from the main page i get page not found. How can I link the main album page to the main album? I can only link pages to galleries.
Alex Mielus 8 martie 2012 la 17:03 - Raspunde

Gilbert did you create a page with the code for the main album?
[album=4, compact]
… where 4 is the ID of your main album.

If you did go to „Gallery settings” in admin and make sure „Deactivate gallery page link” is NOT checked.

Let me know if that worked.
Swan 1 septembrie 2020 la 7:14 - Raspunde

Hi Alex,
Thanks for your clear instructions. I’ve set up Albums >> Sub Albums >> Galleries, similar to your example. For each album, subalbum, and gallery, I created a page of its own. The setup works perfectly – I got the pages linked properly with NGG breadcrumbs. There is one problem I can’t get it to work. Suppose I have Asia > Japan > Tokyo. On the „Tokyo” page, I have a short paragraph of text, then after the paragraph I insert the „Tokyo” galley (loaded with a group of images in pro Mosaic mode). After publishing the page, I only see the mosaic gallery thumbnails with the correct breadcrumbs. But, the written text above it is missing. Sorry if this is a stupid question as I am a newbie. Am I missing something? I am not even sure if this problem is with NextGEN or the theme that I use?
- Alex Mielus 1 septembrie 2020 la 19:24 - Raspunde
  
  I am not sure what you mean Swan. Any text that may be added, before or after NextGen’s gallery code, should be showing correctly.
Swan 2 septembrie 2020 la 2:04 - Raspunde

Hi Alex,
Yes! I am puzzled. When I first loaded the page with a NextGEN gallery (the lowest level, like „Tokyo” gallery) and nothing else, the page works properly. A line of NGG breadcrumbs (NOT the page title) is displayed above the gallery thumbnails. Then I added some text before the gallery, updated the page. The „Preview” shows the text that I entered, but the breadcrumb is missing. This is perhaps understandable because I am previewing the page on its own. However, when I navigate the website and proceed to the „Tokyo” page, I don’t see the text, but the breadcrumb is there.
I hope I explained it clearly. In other words, preview page: text is there, but no breadcrumbs. On website: breadcrumb is there, but no text.
Thanks a lot for responding so quickly!
Swan 3 septembrie 2020 la 20:21 - Raspunde

Just to let you know that I found out how to solve my problems. I started out nesting album 1 > album 2 > gallery and having „Not Linked” settings (no link from gallery to page). I enabled breadcrumbs in NGG global setting and it worked perfectly for me. But, with this setting I can’t add custom text to a page where the inserted gallery is unlinked.

So, I am trying the alternate option. That is, changing the NGG gallery settings to link albums and galleries to pages and using a custom breadcrumb plugin to manage breadcrumbs outside of NGG.