I hope it’s a great one! I just got back from one as well.

Thanks Scott. Appreciate it.

I’m currently on holiday with my family so I will look into this when I get back to work. :)

Feel free to email me if you want me to look. You have my email address :-)

I am sure you guys have improved the plugin considerably. The plugins is still active on that website but the gallery is not displaying properly. I may revisit it again and see why the image paths messed up.

Sorry Scott but you are jumping to conclusions. I never used any third party plugins, hooks, or mods, with NextGen Gallery. I used it on its own.

I simply hosted a gallery of pictures that people could use to download as desktop wallpapers. No addon was necessary for it.

As I noted, I have used the plugin for several years and have a lot of experience with it breaking.

Hey Kevin,

NextGEN Gallery has never and still never has a desktop wallpaper feature. So it sounds like you were using a third party plugin that didn’t stay up to date with our hooks, API, etc. Although it’s easy to blame NextGEN Gallery for that, you shouldn’t, as it was 100% out of our control that a third party plugin doesn’t update their code.

NextGEN Gallery did have high CPU usage prior to us acquiring it. We addressed that very fast, and now it runs better than similar plugins and other plugins that does heavy lifting like ours. For example, NextGEN Gallery uses less resources than WooCommerce, which is a powerhouse.

With that said. We appreciate the feedback and we hope you consider checking it out again in the future.

Hi Scott.

I appreciate you taking the time to leave a comment.

I also understand where you are coming from. Many WordPress users leave negative reviews without first testing what is wrong with a plugin and seeing whether there are any conflictions etc. However, I do understand how the plugin got such a low rating.

My comments stem from experience.

I installed NextGen Gallery on a couple of websites. One by one I removed it from each website because of problems with it.

With one website I had the plugin installed for several years as it powered the desktop wallpaper section.

I am someone who knows plugins quite well and knows hows to debug them, but I had nothing but problems with NextGen over the years. Several times my gallery stopped displaying properly after an update. Eventually I removed the wallpaper section altogether because I was spending too much time trying to fix it all the time. All I wanted was for the plugin to just work once I set it up, but there always seemed to be something that caused problems. It always seemed like the plugin was never debugged before updates were uploaded.

NextGen also has a bad reputation for high CPU usage. I am not sure if that is still the case, but I have read many stories of website owners being told to remove the plugin or they would have their shared hosting account closed.

Everything I write on this blog comes from personal experience so if something does not work well, I advise my readers of it.

Kevin