Optimizing NextGEN Gallery Images with ImageRecycle

ImageRecycle is a plugin that helps you compress images, such as those you upload on WordPress and Joomla. That much should be clear if you have been following ImageRecycle’s plugin development. What may not be immediately obvious is that ImageRecycle is much more versatile than that.

Whereas you may be accustomed to using ImageRecycle to compress images in your WordPress media library, ImageRecycle can also be used to compress images from other WordPress plugins. One of those is one of WordPress’ biggest plugins—NextGEN Gallery.

Linking NextGEN Gallery Images with ImageRecycle

NextGEN Gallery is one of WordPress’ most popular plugins. Tailored for photographers, the plugin lets you create galleries out of photographs. Where there are photographers, large, high-res images are bound to follow. This is exactly where ImageRecycle comes in.

With ImageRecycle, you can optimize NextGEN Gallery images by compressing the galleries’ folders. Once you install NextGEN Gallery, you need to make sure that ImageRecycle has visibility of NextGEN Gallery’s images. Head to NextGEN Gallery’s other options page.

The first field in the image options section is a path to where the NextGEN Gallery’s images will be stored. By default, NextGEN Gallery images are stored in the wp-content/gallery folder, but you can move galleries to a different directory. Whichever path you choose, copy it and head to ImageRecycle’s settings.

ImageRecycle usually looks for images in your WordPress blog’s wp-content/uploads folder, which means that by default, it cannot find NextGEN Gallery images. If ImageRecycle cannot find these galleries, then neither can it compress their images. To link the two plugins together, update the include folders selection in ImageRecycle’s settings to include NextGEN Gallery’s path.

Optimizing NextGEN Gallery Images

That one-time setup is all it takes to start compressing NextGEN Gallery images. To optimize NextGEN Gallery images, create a gallery as usual from the plugin. Then, head to ImageRecycle to start compressing the images.

The first time you want to optimize NextGEN Gallery images, you might have to press the index images button. This action updates ImageRecycle’s file index and fetch files from the newly-added NextGEN Gallery plugin’s directory. Once indexing finishes, you can optimize NextGEN Gallery images as you would compress any other image uploaded to your WordPress blog.

Images are images, no matter where they originate from. NextGEN Gallery images are no different—they reside in your WordPress blog just like any other file. Just like that, NextGEN Gallery media too can get in on ImageRecycle’s image compression party.