Update: See note at the end, that’s good news; kind of. And read the comments showing how Imagely rose to the occasion. Thanks!
Very Long Time User of NextGEN
I have been a fan of NextGEN Gallery, a plugin to WordPress to manage image assets since it came into the scene. It is easy to use, capable of interfacing with different presentation styles, until recently well-supported. It has many users, and deservedly so. However, I would like to alert all users of NextGEN Gallery that its file uploading inflates the file size for some reason. Click on the opening image and look at the local file sizes on the left and compare them to the Web site gallery file sizes. You will see huge bloat. I posted a problem report on WordPress forums where NextGEN used to get support. But as of today, there was no answer.
I also reported this to NextGEN on their Google+ account, no movement there either. They only suggested that they do not support the users of the free version and that I may report it on their bug report site. I reported the problem as they suggested, and reminded them that although the plugin was free, I made two donations to Alex Rabe who graciously accepted them. These inquiries have not produced any result either. Feel free to compare your local and server file sizes and report your findings as comments to this post. With more information, they can find the underlying cause of it sooner.
File Size Concern
I am concerned about this not from a space utilization view, but from a content delivery perspective. I have an unlimited storage quota where I host this site. But when the system must deliver a 1.1 MB file instead of a 480KB file, the delays are inevitable. Yes, the difference will not be huge, but when a gallery contains 30-50 images, the toll on the page load speed will be significant.
I am also not suggesting that you should worry about your site until you lose sleep over it. But do worry about the future of NextGEN Gallery as the new owners at Photocrati do not seem to be as responsive to user reports as the solo developer Alex Rabe used to be. Let us hope that Photocrati will reconsider and start listening to bug reports.
Imagely Came Through!
Note: After Dennis reported that he did not experience this problem and the file sizes were the same on local and remote, I tested a couple of things. First, I disabled the Flash upload and uploaded a file. The file size remained the same, good! Then I enabled the Flash upload and uploaded the same file once more, and the file size remained the same, good but question. I have a duplicate copy of the file in the same folder since NG tries to maintain the gallery integrity and they are dimensionally the same, but file sizes are vastly different. The disable-enable Flash seems to have done a kind of Heimlich maneuver to dislodge whatever was causing this problem. The question remains though, how to make sure this does not happen again.
Spring on Spring Green Road
Sal Capirchio
Cemal-As you know, I use NextGen on my site and have been pleased thus far. But I’m just curious if “we” have an alternative gallery offering that can simulate what NextGen offers. Just thinking proactively, in case we do start to toss and turn at night. All kidding aside, its possible based on the lack of response that the developer has moved on to other things. I know from experience that changing things like this at times can improve the situation, however, in some cases it can be like “the devil you don’t know”.
A. Cemal Ekin
Yes, Alex Rabe sold the product to Photocrati and he may or may not be a part of the NextGEN team. Photocrati “seems” to be interested in retaining NextGEN as a strong product, but with this attitude of ignoring problem reports it may be wise to start looking around. I will keep looking and let you know.
Jackie K.
I love MaxGalleria and they finally released a free version on WordPress. https://wordpress.org/plugins/maxgalleria-lite/ They have a nextgen importer, thank god, i’ve heard so much about other people’s galleries breaking :(
Dennis Goulet
Hi Cemal,
I just did a test upload of twelve images of 250K to 500K file size and they all appeared on my WP gallery at the same size. I’ve emailed you the screen capture of the source and target folders from the FTP. Don’t know why there should be a difference.
A. Cemal Ekin
I am glad you did that Dennis, it helps me to look at other places for possible file bloat. You saw the screen capture on the post, that’s what I am experiencing.
Scott Wyden Kivowitz
Hi Cemal,
Glad you got it worked out – looking into changes for the flash uploader is on our list for future updates.
Please note regarding the lack of response: we can not provide individual support for the free plugin. With over 7 million free downloads, it’s just not feasible. However, we are always actively monitoring the forums and bug reports even if we’re not always able to reply.
We are also working on a premium version of the plugin which will come with support at an affordable price. Until that is ready, we are focusing our support around wide spread bugs that are impacting the majority of users. I hope you can understand all of that.
A. Cemal Ekin
Thank you Scott for replying to my post. I understand that providing support can be time consuming. If that has become a burden, you should perhaps announce it and remove the WordPress forum thread for NextGEN Gallery. Having it there, even suggesting to users to post their questions on that forum and totally ignoring the inquiries is worse than not having the forum. It creates the false impression that NextGEN is still supported on the WordPress.org forums but the reality is that it is not supported at all. I wonder how Alex Rabe managed to respond to many inquiries.
Erick
Hi Cemal,
Erick here from Photocrati. I just want to say thanks for your input. It’s obvious you’ve been using NextGEN a long time, so we take the feedback seriously. It’s important to me personally and to Photocrati that we keep long-time members of the NG community engaged and using the plugin.
I’m glad that you resolved the specific issue you were having. I want you to know it’s on our radar. If we see it as a common issue among other users, we’ll elevate it importance and address it.
Beyond that, I just wanted to share a few thoughts with you to give you a glimpse into how we see support for NextGEN Gallery. If you have suggestions or feedback, let me know.
As Scott noted, we don’t commit to active one-on-one support in the WP.org forums.
The main reason is not just that it’s time consuming. We’d love to do it, and don’t mind putting in the time to some reasonable extent. The challenge is that with hundreds of thousands free users, it’s basically financially impossible to freely support that many people in a one-on-one manner. This is a common challenge that all WP plugin developers face and frequently discuss. Alex faced it too, and it was one of the main reasons he felt he needed to move on from NextGEN.
I will say that we are always monitoring the WP.org forums so we are aware of the types of issues people are having. Because of limited resources, we basically have to do a bit of “triage” and decide which issues to tackle, and which to leave. Apart from issues, we also need to weigh how much time to spend on new features and development vs addressing individual users issues.
When weighing these decisions, our goal is basically to do the greatest good for the greatest number.
In the forums, that means we look for threads that start getting many users saying “me too.” We look for these not just because these issues are affecting more users rather than less, but because anything affecting many users is likely to be a legitimate bug in the plugin, while something affecting 1 user (out of hundreds of thousands) is like to be local or specific to that user (ie, a plugin or theme conflict, NextGEN not installed correctly, hosting configuration problem, etc).
So we monitor all issues, but focus responses on those issues that seem to affect larger number of users. Again, it’s not that we don’t want to respond to every single user, but that doing so would prohibitively expensive and that most responses wouldn’t help the broader community so much as each individual user.
–
You had also mentioned that if we’re not providing consistent one-on-one replies, we should remove the WP.org support forums. As far as I know, plugin developers don’t have this option. The support forums are built into the structure of the WP.org plugin repository.
But even if it were possible, I don’t think we’d want to do it. First, the forum provides a channel for community support – users helping users. Second, as I described above, it provides an efficient channel for us to monitor what’s happening with the plugin, and to jump in when we think it’s appropriate and justified, and to identify and fix legitimate bugs when we find them.
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So I’m trying to give you a sense for how we approach support in the forums, why we can’t provide one-on-one responses to every support query, how we make a determination for when to jump in, and why the forums are valuable even if we can’t reply.
Of course, I know that no amount of explanation or justification for why we don’t/can’t is going to be satisfying to users who are having a specific problem with the plugin. The legitimately want and need support, and we’re the people best able to give it. If they can’t get it from us, where are they going to get it?
So I empathize with that sentiment, and I might very well feel the same way as a user if I was having a problem.
–
Now that I’ve laid it all out, I’ll come around to my main point for spending this much time responding to you here. Mostly, I’d like your feedback.
Do you understand the logic above for why it’s difficult if not impossible to provide one-on-one support? If so, how, as a user, would you must like to see us respond to that dilemma.
I have considered, for example, putting a stick thread at the top of the forum laying out how we approach support and how we decide when to reply. That would at least help people set expectations. My main concern is that we’d get a bunch of hate mail about how we should just provide active support anyways from people who just can’t or don’t want to grasp the underlying nature of the challenge. I worry that setting expectations in advance would, in short, do more harm than good.
I’ve considered recruiting power users to help with support and giving them some kind of special status or kudos, but we’re talking about free labor there, and that’s a big thing to ask of anyone.
We’ve considered various ways to encourage community user-to-user support, but again, that’s a challenge for the same reason.
If you have other suggestions, let me know. I’d also be curious to know if after having me lay all this out, your basic thought is: “That’s nice, Erick, but as long as it’s your plugin I expect you to support it – even if it’s free, and regardless of the challenges.” If so, that tells me something valuable too.
Thanks and best,
Erick
A. Cemal Ekin
Erick, thank you for your detailed and well articulated explanation. I understand your dilemma. I did have a technology company and had to offer support on a much smaller scale and also local in scope. I know where you are coming from. Often times, this is a “communication issue” as well as trouble shooting one. Perhaps the triage process you use may consider to identify 1) Well documented, 2) Easy to get to, 3)Identified but time consuming to fix, and the like. If the trouble tickets are quickly identified as such and the users are informed of this that will likely release some pressure. Not knowing whether anyone has seen, does care, will help, … is probably the most frustrating part at the user end of tech support. Acknowledging the receipt and how it is classified may prevent the users from building up steam. One thing that companies like you MUST not do is to get into silly arguments with cryptic and unfounded reasoning and treat the user first as an idiot and at fault. That throws fuel on fire, at least for users like me ;-)
I have installed NextGEN Gallery on client sites that I developed and encouraged them to make a donation and at times made the donation on their behalf. This model of using high quality software on a “pay as you please” basis is tough. However, an ecosystem like WordPress seems to thrive on this model and has given birth to companies like Photocrati. It will evolve to find solutions.
Good luck, and thank you again for providing this information to me and anyone who may be reading this post.
Erick
Thanks for the reply, Cemal. For what it’s worth, you should know that your reply and some others we’ve had are compelling us to look at how we provide support for NextGEN and how we might improve it. We’ll consider your latest feedback as well, especially the communication component. Our team cares deeply about NextGEN Gallery, but I don’t anyone can tell if response are very sparse and we don’t have that much density of interaction. So we’ll need to adapt what we’re doing in some way or another.
Thanks again.
Erick