Shutter Reloaded Plugin and Nextgen Gallery

One of the nice things about the Nextgen Gallery Plugin is that it separates gallery management (the presentation, organization and pagination of thumbnails) from presentation effects. You can select from a variety of presentation modules including shutter reloaded, lightbox, thickbox, and others. Most of these presentation modules create a semi-modal CSS overlay on top of your blog’s web page that deal with resizing the image to fit the browser window, dimming the page, and offer various options like next, previous, show meta information, etc. So it’s really easy to create a professional slide show without writing a line of flash.

Nextgen uses thickbox by default, so you don’t need to download anything to use it. Unfortunately, due to a problem with jQuery, thickbox doesn’t work properly in some versions of IE7. Rather than debug it immediately, I chose to look at the alternatives. Shutter reloaded was the first plugin I looked at, and I am quite pleased with it. The footprint is smaller, its fast and works out of the box. All you have to do is download and install the plugin, then set the Javascript Thumbnail Effect to Shutter in the WP administrative interface (Settings – Gallery – Options – Effects).

Sweet. See it in action here when you click on one of the thumbnails in the gallery.