Photo Gallery for WordPress
When I started redesigning my website, I decided that I should have a photo gallery and the first thing that came to my mind was hosting my photos on Flickr and using some plugin to integrate and display the images on my website.
After some googling I found heaps of available options to integrate Flickr with WordPress. Many of the plugins supports widgets to display images in sidebar and others to integrate photos or photosets directly into posts or pages. The one plugin which I liked the most was FAlbum. FAlbum is a really good flickr plugin for worpdress, easy to install and configure. The thing that I liked the most about this plugin is that other than showing photos in sidebar or posts, I can create a new page, like a photo gallery, which will list all my photosets and when I click on any of the photoset, it will display thumbnails of all the photos in the set. I can then click on the thumbnail to view the image. The gallery page is easy to customize and it didnt take long to change the layout according to my template.
But the problem with Flickr is that the standard account only allows upto three photo set and I definitely need to categorize my images in more groups. So I decided to try Flickr’s competitor Googles photo sharing tool Picasa. But unfortunately I found very few plugins to integrate Picasa with WordPress and most of the available plugins only offer very basic functionality and Implementing a full-fledged photo gallery didnt look like an easy task. 
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With a decent amount of storage space still available in my hosting account, I decided not to pay anything to Flickr or any other image hosting and instead host all my photos in my web host. My search for a good photo album plugin started again and findly I found NextGen Gallery, the best photo gallery plugin I found for WordPress so far.
After installing and activating the plugin, When I first latest news section on the plugin page, I was happy and excited to know that many NextGen add-on plugins are available and this will definitely give me more options and control on how and where I want to display my photos and implement the gallery. I was bit confused with the terms album and gallery but as soon as I added my first gallery and started upload some pictures, I found Nextgen plugin very easy to use. We create galleries , add photos in the gallery and group galleries into albums. We can add an image, a gallery or a whole album in our posts or pages. It also comes with widget support to display a fixed number of random or newly added images from a selected gallery (or galleries), or to add a slide show or image rotator (again we can select which galleries we want to include).
Currently, I’m using NextGen to display some images I have recently added to one of my gallery and also to add a slide show of another gallery on my homepage.
Now when I’m comfortable with this great plugin, I’m planning to play around with some of the NextGen addons.