This is a small extension for NextGen Gallery, it allow you to specify which area NGG must use to generate the the thumbnail.

Quite often the thumbnails generated by NGG do not show the "right" part of the picture, this happen especially when you have a gallery with people, where you want to show in the thumb the face and not the belly.

Demo

Have a look here where you can see two galleries (same pictures) the first with the standard and the second with custom thumbnails.

Installation

First unpack the archive to the NGG root directory, then open manage-images.php and modify line 338 from

<img class="thumb" src="<?php echo $picture->thumbURL; ?>" <?php echo $thumbsize ?> />

to

<img class="thumb" id="thumb<?php echo $pid ?>" src="<?php echo $picture->thumbURL; ?>" <?php echo $thumbsize ?> />

and add this line at the end of nggallery.php

include_once (dirname (__FILE__)."/admin/custom_thumbnails.php");

Download

Here the package for the version 0.2 it ONLY works with WP 2.7 and NGG 1.0

Download Version 0.2

Screenshots

List with "Edit thumbnail" action

Popup for area selection

I found the plugin "Allow Embedded Videos" (http://wpmudev.org/project/Allow-Embedded-Videos) but still the button in the editor didn't show up.

Download it here