As many of you WordPress users may already know, NextGen gallery is one of the most scalable image gallery plugins available for the WordPress platform. It makes adding an image gallery to a post or page extremely easy and allows for simple image and album organization.
Most of the NextGen features seem to work right out of the box with the exception of the permalinks. I struggled for hours trying to get the permalinks (that are built into NextGen) working and producing SEO friendly url’s, but the instructions given are unclear and were not producing results for me.
When I realized why this was happening and corrected the problem, I wondered why there was not a clear cut explanation of how to accomplish this anywhere that I could find. So without further adieu, here are the instructions:
STEP 1:
Make sure your WORDPRESS (not NextGen) permalinks are set to “Default” (Settings->Permalinks). Click “Save Changes”. This is what was causing me issues. Most WordPress users don’t use the default permalink settings as they don’t produce SEO friendly url’s. My permalink settings were set to “Post name”. The instructions provided by NextGen say nothing about using the “default” setting, only that you must “update” your permalink structure.
Step 2:
In your NextGen Gallery options (Gallery->Options), click the box for “Activate Permalinks”. Do NOT change the gallery slug name away from “nggallery”.
Step 3:
Return to your WordPress permalink settings (Settings->Permalinks), ensure that the box for “default” is checked and click “Save Changes”. This is the updating of your permalink structure that they speak of in the instructions.
Step 4:
Go to the main page of your website and refresh your browser. Now click into the NextGen image galleries you have set up on your website and notice the url’s they produce. Now you will have the name of your gallery populated in the url rather than random numbers.
Step 5:
You will notice that in lieu of a postname, your url’s for other area’s of your website will still be producing id numbers rather than post slugs in the url. This is because you changed your permalink structure to “default”. You can now return to your WordPress permalink settings (Settings->Permalinks) and check the box for “Post name” and click “Save Changes”.
Your new SEO friendly permalinks will look something like this:
/post-slug-name/ngg-album-name/nggallery/ngg-album-name/ngg-gallery-name
The results may not be the cleanest you are looking for but the permalinks are indeed working now and it is much more SEO friendly than random id numbers.
If NextGen Gallery provided these instructions out of the box, it would make much more sense to people trying to get the permalinks to function. The checking of the “defalut” values box in the WordPress permalink settings is crucial in making this work. It seems so simple yet I could not find this information anywhere.
Hopefully this will save you hours of frustration. Let me know of any questions.
If you found this article helpful, please share on social media.
Leave a Comment Below...