Love NextGen Galleries / Imagely Themes, Don’t Love the LR Plugin

  • Resolved jeffreyjdavis

    (@jeffreyjdavis)


    1 year ago

    I am a long time (>5 years) paid subscriber of NextGen Galleries Pro / Imagely themes, in fact my entire website https://www.jeffreyjdavis.com is based on this backbone for image display and print fulfillment. I just wish I could find a robust solution to populate galleries directly from Lightroom, which is the missing link towards making my life complete.

    I’ve never been able to get the Imagely plugin to work effectively and have resorted to third party solutions (NextGEN Gallery LR Plugin and WP/LR Sync) both of which are independent developer projects which tend to “break” whenever LR comes out with a major revision.

    Ideally I would love the Imagely ecosystem to handle the solution end to end, LR to WordPress to $ in my pocket. Am I the only one who can’t get success out of the Imagely connect LR plugin? When I try to publish a gallery (HTTP mode) I get a series of javascript errors as shown below screenshots. Lightroom progress bar just hangs after a while and the Imagely logs show that it is just waiting for a response endlessly. When I try to use FTP mode , it complains the the custom preset is incomplete (even though it’s not). I am not clear whether FTP uploads have been totally deprecated in the plugin or not.

    As it stands I am having to manually upload my galleries and I don’t really have a sync solution which is what I desperately desire.

    Windows 11

    LRC 13.0.1

    WordPress 6.4.1 running Imagely Ansel theme. Using Genesis 3.4.0. / PHP 8.2

    My host is a normal commercial hosting platform Dreampress Pro on Dreamhost

    Am I doing something wrong or is there something I need to adjust server side?

    View post on imgur.com
    ImagelyRemoteApp logs:
    11/15/2023 17:22:11 INFO queueAction: collection_status
    11/15/2023 17:22:11 INFO {
    isDefaultCollection = false,
    localIdentifier = 18294795,
    name = "Test Sync 202311",
    storagePath = ""
    }
    11/15/2023 17:22:11 INFO queueAction 2
    11/15/2023 17:22:11 INFO queueAction 3
    11/15/2023 17:22:11 INFO {
    actionStatus = "pending"
    }
    11/15/2023 17:22:12 INFO queueAction: collection_status
    11/15/2023 17:22:12 INFO {
    isDefaultCollection = false,
    localIdentifier = 18294795,
    name = "Test Sync 202311",
    storagePath = ""
    }
    11/15/2023 17:22:12 INFO queueAction 2
    11/15/2023 17:22:12 INFO queueAction 3
    11/15/2023 17:22:12 INFO {
    actionStatus = "pending"
    }
    View post on imgur.com
    View post on imgur.com
Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Plugin Contributor Imagely

    (@imagely)

    Hi @jeffreyjdavis,

    Sorry to hear of the LR publishing problem.

    We’ll of course be happy to help, but first, we’ll need to friendly ask you to send us a support ticket at https://www.imagely.com/support/ because here, in the forum, we are not allowed to offer support for the premium features due to the forum’s rules.

    We may have some suggestions that should ultimately help you include Imagely LR into the workflow.

    Hi there,
    I am running into the same problems as Jeff.
    I have installed a fresh LR Classic Installation, downloaded the current NexGen LR Plugin (imagely-lightroom-connect-setup-1.0.22).

    After installing and trying to publish in a gallery (HTTP mode) it creates a folder and a Gallery in WP. – Great so far.

    However, once that’s done a Runnintime Error shows up in LR and that’s it.
    What’s missing is that after upload LR doesn’t finish the job and the published pictures disappear in the publishing mode in LR Classic.

    When I press the publish-button in LR again, it uploads an new Gallery in WP. The running time error still shows up. I can repeat that as often I want with the same error message.

    What was supposed to happen …. every modification in the LR Gallery creates a new task for publishing …. once published … it does exactly that, no Error, the publishing task clear (the published pictures disappear in LR) and that’s it.

    Can you help …

    Imagely is one of the three solutions I’ve been looking at today as I’d like to buy asap to get some images online.

    After reading these posts, I’m a tad nervous however. Would someone be willing to expand a little on the problems you’re facing?

    This review in 2023 is a bit concerning.
    https://www.isitwp.com/wordpress-plugins/nextgen-gallery/

    • This reply was modified 11 months, 2 weeks ago by bloggy2013.
    Thread Starter jeffreyjdavis

    (@jeffreyjdavis)

    I think NextGen / Imagely is a great image backend for WordPress. Themes are great, and flexibility / customizability / ecommerce integration is good. I think their “overhead fees” on your ecommerce are higher than other platforms such as Pixieset. But I have used Imagely for 3 or 4 years on my site https://www.jeffreyjdavis.com and it works well.

    The issue has always been with Lightroom Integration. Ideally you would set it up as a publish service , make collections under that service and could keep it totally synced with latest versions of the images in LR. In the early days, the Imagely native plugin was really trash for me and I could never get it to work. It was based solely on SFTP. This forced the use of 3rd party publish plugins.

    I relied on NextGEN Gallery by https://www.alloyphoto.com for several years and it worked very well. But when LR started pushing major updates semi-annually it would typically “break” the publish service , requiring another license purchase etc. Developer was not very responsive and I eventually gave up on it in early 2023.

    I tried WP/LR Sync from MeowApps.com. Full Featuired publish service with a lot of functionality and other image organization tools in WordPress . It worked for a while but then it also “broke” with the fall 2023 LR update. Developer wasn’t able to get me up and running though we did go back and forth a bit.

    So I posted here about 4 weeks ago and gave Imagely’s native LR plugin another shot. Mihai worked with me and we tried a number of different things. He/She literally went back and forth over the period of a couple of days working to get it working. I would classify the support as very responsive but ultimately I never got it working.

    What you will find is that for any developer this is a pretty complex problem, involving intricacies in your LR setup, your Hosting provider and hosting plan, and your WordPress environment (WP Version, PHP version, what other plugins you are running). Debugging it will require a fair amount of technical ability on your part (PHP errors logs, modifying WPconfig.ini files etc). My gut feel is that it requires a fair amount of processing horsepower to organize and index the files on upload from the LR Sync and certain subroutines can crap out if you aren’t on a high CPU / RAM dedicated hosting plan.

    You can always upload the images manually but it really defeats some of the elegance of the LR integration. I hope you have better luck than I did. I also hope that one day my system “heals itself” somehow with a wordpress or PHP or plugin update.

    That’s some very good input.
    BTW, the review I posted seems to suggest trying Envira Gallery.

    I don’t yet know all of our needs so am not really sure what we’ll go with. We mostly have online images and images being sold to prints.
    It sounds like imagely automates a lot of guesswork by offering correct print sizes based on image size (pixels) but that Envira doesn’t. Not really sure what else we’d need so I’ll keep researching.

    Thank you.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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