Zero support for functions that don’t work

@beargfr – Thanks for posting. I understand the frustration when things don’t work. Two quick points:

1) Deactivating plugins to check for conflicts is fairly standard troubleshooting behavior throughout the ecosystem.

2) One reason our team assume’s it’s not a general bug is that we test regularly, and we know this functionality is working on a wide array of installs. That means, almost by definition, there’s something quite specific going on. In such cases, it’s often a plugin conflict or some environmental variable. Hence the requests from our team.

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All that said – I don’t like to see the 1 star review here. If you’re still interested, you can send us login credentials for your site, and I’ll have a dev take a quick look to see if we can narrow down the issue for you. If you’d like to do that, just submit a but report at https://www.imagely.com/report-bug/.

Put For Erick in the title and reference that thread so our team knows to bring it my attention.

If you’ve already moved on, no worries. We hope you find a better solution that works. In that case, I might make a request: Given that it’s one bit of functionality out of probably 500 options and behaviors in NextGEN that you’re having issues with, and given that we know the functionality works and the issue is something specific, any chance I could convince you to upgrade your review to, say, 3 stars or 2 stars. The basic idea of your review as I see it: ‘Yes this is popular and powerful gallery plugin that works for most users. One important component – folder imports – is not working for me. While I recognize it’s only a small part of the plugin and it’s not affecting all users, I’m disappointed that it doesn’t work and that I didn’t get more direct troubleshooting help.’

I think I’d agree that under those conditions, a 3 star review is warranted.

I’m not sure how many times I’m going to have to say this: I will *not* be permitting you to log into my site to mess with things. Period. For you to even ask for that sort of access is beyond belief.
A potentially long-running process such as your import function should always maintain some sort of log or trace so that it problems happen, there is a trail to help debug the issue. That’s the most basic software 101 sort of idea. Even something simple, such as writing messages to a log file that say “I’m starting to work on this file now” would at least give people a clue of where to start looking when there are problems.
I honestly do not care how many -other- users your plugin works for. All I know is that it doesn’t work for me, and also does not provide any sort of diagnostic help when there is a problem. I know that it’s difficult to anticipate all of the possible permutations of configuration that you might encounter “out in the wild”. That’s all the more reason to build in robust diagnostic capabilities into your code – which obviously you have failed to do.

Ok, thanks for the feedback.

One side note: It sounds like you’re unhappy that we offered to look at your site directly if you sent creds. I usually only offer that in special cases. Normally, it’s something people appreciate because it means getting a dev directly focused on solving your problem. I do, of course, hear your point on providing some kind of error reporting of course. Just wanted to clarify that we weren’t trying to burden you by trying to access your site, but rather trying to help.

Regardless, thanks for taking the time to post and reply. We wish you the best.

This experience has prompted me to “shop elsewhere” and I’ve very glad that I did. I found and have installed WP Photo Album Plus and so far, I love it. It works. The import from folder function loaded all the files that Nextgen couldn’t handle and never missed a beat. It’s much more configurable, I like the way that it presents thumbnails in posts and pages much better, and the built in slideshow function rocks. It’s full function, there are no extra ‘pro’ features that you have to pay for, although the author does accept donations.