Gallery vs NextGEN Gallery Sidebar Widget

Photo & Image Gallery FooGallery makes it easy to create stunning photo and image galleries using drag and drop in minutes. It’s responsive, retina-ready, SEO-friendly, and optimized for performance. With beautiful gallery layouts, live gallery previews, a built-in lightbox, and deep customization options, FooGallery is a complete gallery solution for modern WordPress websites. Launch Your Own FooGallery Demo (Backend included) FooGallery gives you live previews as you design your galleries, includes a visual gallery layout selector, and integrates seamlessly with the WordPress block editor and shortcodes. It’s developer-friendly, performance-focused, and fully extendable. Visit the FooGallery Homepage All FooGallery Demos Key Features 7 Beautiful Free Gallery layouts: Responsive Gallery – demo Image Viewer Gallery – demo Masonry Gallery – demo Portfolio Gallery – demo Justified Gallery – demo Single Thumbnail Gallery – demo Carousel – demo Built-in Lightbox: Adjust colors, transitions, captions, and controls with fullscreen, thumb strip, auto progress, prev/next, and download button support. Advanced Customization: Control thumbnail sizes, spacing, hover effects, caption line limits, mobile columns, background fill, custom attributes, and more. Visual Gallery Builder: Use the gallery layout selector, live preview device switcher, drag-and-drop uploads, advanced attachment modal, and shortcode helpers to build galleries faster. Block Editor & Shortcodes: Add galleries with the WordPress block editor, preview them live while editing, and fine-tune output with shortcode arguments and page/offset controls. Performance Optimized: Lazy loading, pagination, reduced layout shifts, fingerprinted assets, and broad compatibility with image optimization and caching plugins for fast loading times. SEO-Ready: ALT and title attributes, attachment descriptions, and full integration with Yoast, Rank Math, and AIOSEO. Albums built-in: Responsive album layout – demo All-in-one Stack album – demo (just activate the albums feature) Import / Export galleries between WP installs, with progress and resume support for large imports – docs Drag n Drop reordering of images and galleries Drag n Drop images into gallery to upload into gallery (and media library) Custom CSS for both galleries and albums One-click gallery page creation FooGallery Migrator – easily migrate from Envira / NextGen / Modula Multisite Support Password protected image galleries PRO Features FooGallery PRO adds professional-level features and integrations for photographers, agencies, and eCommerce users. PRO Starter Plan Our PRO Starter plan is our most affordable plan and includes features that take your WordPress galleries to the next level! PRO Starter is mostly for photographers or website owners that want better-looking galleries and lightboxes. View PRO Starter Details 4 additional gallery layouts: Polaroid – demo Grid – demo Slider – demo Spotlight – demo 11 hover effect presets – demo 12 CSS thumbnail effects (Instagram-style) – demo Colors and color sorting: Extract dominant colors from images, sort galleries by color, and apply opaque or tinted backgrounds for a more art-directed look. PRO Expert Plan Our PRO Expert plan unlocks exactly what you would expect – expert-level features! Our most popular plan is for professional photographers and website owners who want to invest in how their galleries look and work. View PRO Expert Details Video Galleries: Import from YouTube, YouTube Shorts, Vimeo, or self-hosted sources demos Filtering & Tagging: Filter by Media Tags or Categories with multi-level filtering, search, dropdown filter styles, and advanced selection modes demos Dynamic Galleries: Load images from folders, Lightroom, Real Media Library, Infinite Uploads, or posts, with support for ACF fields and richer post query controls. demos Advanced Pagination: Load More, Infinite Scroll, and Numbered pagination demos Advanced Custom Captions Create captions using placeholders & custom HTML demos EXIF metadata Showcase your photo metadata in the Lightbox demo Media Category Folders Browse and work with media category folders directly inside the attachment modal. Bulk Copy Easily copy gallery settings to other galleries more info ImageGallery SEO Schema Output opt-in ImageGallery JSON-LD schema for pages that use FooGallery, with per-gallery schema overrides for richer image discovery. PRO Commerce Features Our PRO Commerce plan is for the photographers who make a living from selling their photos online. We have integrated with WooCommerce, to bring you innovative tools to help you sell more with hardly any effort. View PRO Commerce Details WooCommerce integration: Sell your photos or create dynamic product galleries with sorting, filtering, ratings, stock status controls, and deeper WooCommerce integration. more info Image Protection: Watermarking and no right-click options demo Master Product Setup: No more separate products for each image – link all your photos to a single master product. Supports variations, file downloads, WooCommerce blocks, and guided product setup tools. Buttons and Ribbons Add custom buttons, download buttons, styled call-to-actions, and attention-grabbing ribbons to your images. demo Product Info in Lightbox Show product details, price, stock messaging, add-to-cart, checkout, view product, and download actions directly in the lightbox. Gallery Blueprints Create Gallery Templates that share settings across galleries for faster gallery management – docs PRO Addons We also have a collection of powerful add-ons available to enhance your gallery experience. All the Addons work with the FREE version too! User Uploads Addon: Allow visitors to upload images & videos into galleries. Includes image moderation, form field customization, email notifications and more. more info Social Addon: Increase visitor engagement by allowing them to like, comment and share images in your galleries. more info Whitelabel: Allow power users to rename or rebrand “FooGallery”, modify the shortcode, menu, and disable features. more info Client Proofing: Create a private proofing page where your clients can select or reject images in the galleries. (Coming soon!) 3D Splat Viewer: Create emmersive 3D walk-throughs for showcasing products or real-estate. (Coming soon!) See More Demos How to Create a Photo Gallery in WordPress Install and activate FooGallery from the Plugins menu. Click Add Gallery and choose your layout. Upload or select images from your Media Library. Customize captions, hover effects, and lightbox settings. Publish and embed your gallery using a block or shortcode. Integrations and Compatibility Works seamlessly in the Block Editor / Gutenberg. WooCommerce integration to sell photos online. Lightbox plugins : FooBox, dFactory. Page builders : Elementor. SEO Plugins: Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO. Caching Plugins: WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, Autoptimize, WPOptimize. Media Tools: ShortPixel, Imagify, Real Media Library, and Infinite Uploads. Others : Jetpack, Polylang. Documentation FooGallery Documentation

The NextGEN widgets only allow showing of single images, I needed a solution to show links to galleries, so I wrote this widget. You can specify the following parameters: Maximum Galleries: the number of galleries you want to show Gallery Order: you can select random, date added ascending or date added descending Gallery Thumbnail: which image should be taken as thumbail in the sidebar (preview set in NGG, first or random image) AutoThumb parameters: if you got AutoThumb installed, the widget will use its functions to resize the image to your needs. Use a string like w=80&h=80&zc=1 here to show 80×80 square thumbnails. Output width/height: if you don’t use AutoThumb, the plugin will set the HTML attributes width & height. Default Link Id: the widget assumes that you set up pages for each gallery and link the gallery to that page (you can use the NGG Gallery Editor to do this). If a gallery has no link set, it will use the default link (id of a page or post). Exclude galleries: exclude galleries by specifying their ID as comma separated list All development is done on GitHub. If you have ideas, enhancements, etc. feel free to fork the project and send a pull request. For any issues please use the Issue Tracker. Templating: Beginning with version 0.3, you have full control over the widget’s output as it is controlled with templates. As the built-in templates would get overwritten on every plugin update, create a new directory called “ngg-sidebar-widget” in your theme’s directory and copy the two template files “tpl.outer.html” and “tpl.inner.html” over there to edit them. The outer template is just a wrapper template (useful when you need some additional markup, e.g. when creating a list), the inner template has access to all the values from the gallery and image object (written in a simple templating syntax: {=object.member}). For the most use cases you should only need “gallery.title”, “gallery.link” and “image.url”. You will have access to the following variables: gallery gid name path title galdesc pageid previewpic author link image errmsg error imageURL thumbURL imagePath thumbPath href thumbPrefix thumbFolder galleryid pid filename description alttext imagedate exclude thumbcode name path title pageid previewpic permalink post_id sortorder meta_data gid galdesc author imageHTML thumbHTML url output_width output_height output_width_tag output_height_tag