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.

Benjamin –

what limits are you speaking of, the ImageMajick Policy.xml limits? are there recommendations for image files of 6000 x 4000 pixels?