NextGen Search

You can’t search NextGen images with Relevanssi. NextGen doesn’t store them as posts, but instead puts the images in a separate database, and Relevanssi doesn’t understand that.

I’m not quite sure what the ngg_pictures post type is used – but at least on my site that uses NextGen, it’s not used at all.

That’s strange because it is seeing the tags. It simply will not find them as a search result.

The free version of Relevanssi doesn’t find the tags as search results, only posts tagged with those tags, and like I said, NextGen images are not visible to Relevanssi, hence they cannot be found with those tags.

So even though it shows all the image tags in the 25 most common list, it will not report them in the free version? I just want to make sure I understand correctly.
What I do not understand is why NextGen would be created without the ability to search the images. Everything is there in order to be searched. Just makes sense to me to have it built in.

That’s a decision NextGen developers did. If they stored the data in a custom post type, instead of a separate database, Relevanssi would have no problems finding the images.

The free version finds posts tagged with those tags. If there are posts that have those tags, free version will find them. If they appear in the 25 most common words list, that would suggest Relevanssi has found something to match them – you should get some results when searching for the tags.

Can you give me some examples of words that appear in the list of most common words, so I could try them on your site?

Sure! In fact, here is a page with the tag cloud.
https://www.katiespix.com/family/tag-cloud
I’ve re-indexed and all of those tags are in the 25 most common. In fact, it also sees the image names that I haven’t changed/updated yet with titles or descriptions. An example of one of those would be the word, untitled. It has found 2465 of that said word but nothing populates when searched.
Thank you for helping!

Can you give me WP admin access to your site so I could take a closer look at it? This is somewhat odd.

My email is mikko @?mikkosaari.fi.

Granted. Let me know if you did not receive them.

I got them and digged around a bit.

Relevanssi is indeed indexing those ngg_pictures entries. They are not visible in the search, because they are drafts, and Relevanssi doesn’t show drafts in the front-end search.

I forced Relevanssi to show them, and turns out they are not useful. You can’t actually see the pictures like this. So, I’m sorry, but NGG is indeed incompatible with Relevanssi. Best to unindex all the NGG stuff in Relevanssi, because it’s not going to be useful.

Thank you for looking into this. I hate that they wrote their program that way. I could understand it if they wanted to make it a free versus paid option.
Thanks again for all that you’ve done!