All of my themes come with a very nice image effect called “prettyPhoto“. It´s a lightbox clone that opens image links automatically in an overlay or modal window. You don´t need to do anything but link the inserted image in a post or page to its own file. pretty Photo detects image links automatically.

Although this is already a great feature on its own you can use this build-in functionality even more effective. NextGen Gallery is one of the best and most famous image gallery plugins for WordPress. One great thing about NextGen Gallery is the possibility to use various Javascript effects for displaying images. Thickbox – which is included in WordPress by default – is just one of them. Many others are already prepared but you can also use your own.

And this is where prettyPhoto comes into play. If you have NextGen Gallery installed and activated you go to the options page of the plugin. There you should see a tab called “Effects”. On this tab you can select from various Javascript effects. Select “own” as Javascript thumbnail effect and add the following line into the textbox:

Save the settings and navigate to your Gallery page. If you click on a thumbnail it will open in a nice prettyPhoto window.

Screenshot taken from Matthias Priebe

Checking the basic requirements

Personally I never had any issue with the image resizing with TimThumb. But I oftern hear from people or see it in the support forums posts, that images are not displayed as expected. To be honest: In most cases it´s a users mistake and not a script error. But sometimes it´s also related to the webhoster.

Here is a short list taken from Darren Hoyts Website and ammended with some own statements.

• TimThumb requires the GD library, which should be available on any host sever with PHP 4.3+ installed.
• Once installed and in-use, TimThumb will automatically create a /cache/ subfolder with proper write-permissions (if it doesn´t already exist). If your host server doesn’t allow this by default, be sure to manually change the /cache/ folder permissions to 777.
• If your web-hoster doesn´t allow 777 permissions or if 777 doesn´t work, try 755 which sometimes solves the issue.
• In addition, make sure the folder which contains TimThumb is set to 777 (the /scripts subfolder by default).
• Check with your web-hoster if they block the TimThumb script from proper working.
• Use absolute paths for your images (incl. http://…)
• You can´t use external images (for security reasons)
• Make sure the images are uploaded into each post using the post image uploader or attached to the post by using the “attach” functionality in the media library. See also this article for more information.
• Make sure images are not too large because most webservers can´t handle the resizing of very large images. Images shouldn´t be larger than 1024×768.

Still problems with the images?

If you have followed all this “rules” and the images still don´t show up, double-check your settings and look if there is still anything not set correctly (I´m not kidding…). If they still not show up I reccomend to get in touch with your webhoster because i assume it´s on their side. Maybe some security settings avoid proper working of the script.

You can also visit the TimThumb site for further assistance.

• Script Website (external)