I finally made the switch on www.adventuresofbl.com from Imagely (NextGEN Gallery) over to FooGallery. Overdue, honestly.
Why I left Imagely
Imagely wasn’t a bad product. It’s just a lot of product for what I was actually using it for. I was paying a recurring fee for a plugin that, in practice, I was using to do one thing: organize photos into galleries and albums for my travel posts. That’s it. I wasn’t touching most of the premium features I was paying for.
On top of the cost not matching the usage, Imagely was starting to bog down the site itself. The admin experience felt heavier than it needed to be, and managing galleries took more clicks and more patience than a simple photo gallery plugin should require. When something that’s supposed to make publishing easier starts making it feel like a chore, that’s usually a sign it’s time to look elsewhere.
Why FooGallery
FooGallery does what I need without the overhead, and the free version covers it. A few things sold me:
- Justified galleries for free. This was one of the gallery styles I actually wanted, and Imagely didn’t offer it without upgrading. FooGallery just gives it to you out of the box.
- Faster gallery and album management. Creating and organizing galleries is quicker. Less friction between “I have photos to post” and “the gallery is live.”
- Lighter footprint. The admin side of the site feels noticeably snappier since making the switch.
For a travel blog where the whole point is showing photos from a trip, a clean, fast, justified-grid gallery does more for the reader than a pile of premium features I was never going to use.
The migration itself
This ended up being a lot more manual than I expected. FooGallery has a migration plugin that handles converting Imagely galleries over to FooGallery galleries, which was a huge help and saved me from rebuilding everything from scratch. That part was the easy part.
Where it got tedious was everything around the actual gallery conversion. I also installed FileBird to help sort and manage the media library, since I knew I’d need a better way to organize images once things started moving around.
A few things I ran into along the way:
- Some images that Imagely had pulled in to use as single images in a post needed to be reimported after the gallery they originally belonged to got migrated.
- Any gallery pages had to have the old Imagely gallery block removed and replaced with the FooGallery block.
- FooGallery doesn’t have a way to mass-update all galleries to a different style at once, so every single gallery had to be updated by hand.
Since there wasn’t a shortcut for that last one, I ended up going through every blog post I’ve written since I started adventuresofbl.com to make sure images and galleries were actually working. The process for each gallery came down to:
- Migrate the gallery.
- Create a folder for that gallery’s images in the media library using FileBird.
- Move the gallery images into that folder.
- Update the gallery settings: turn off captions, and switch the style to “justified.”
- Check and update the blog post(s) using that gallery or its images and confirm everything’s still working.
Multiply that by every gallery on the site and you can see why this took a while. Worth it in the end, but not exactly a weekend project.
Final thoughts
Sometimes the fix isn’t a better tool, it’s a right-sized one. Imagely is a solid plugin, but it was more than adventuresofbl.com needed, and I was paying premium prices for features collecting dust. FooGallery gets the job done, costs nothing, and made my life easier as the person maintaining the site.
If you’re running a WordPress photo-heavy site and feel like your gallery plugin is doing too much for what you need, it might be worth asking whether a simpler tool would actually serve you better.
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