in-depth review about Thumbnail Scroller, a WordPress post/page slideshow plugin

plugin name: Thumbnail Scroller
developer: Marius Cristian Donea

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review date: January 8, 2013
reviewer: Renee Klein

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review summary:

Thumbnail Scroller is one of the best solutions for a WordPress post gallery. It is completely customizable, resizable and 100% compatible with any browser or any device, including iPhone, iPad & Android smartphones. I absolutely love Thumbnail Scroller and I surely will continue using it on all our sites. I’m sure you’ll love it too! Give it a try, you will have so much fun customizing it, and you will love the results, I promise!

Personally, I love putting up pretty and neat new stuff up here on WPdiscounts.com. Things that are both functional and looking cute have always been at the very top of my “must have” list. Thumbnail scroller was a great discovery and I’ve loved it from the moment I tried it out! It is completely customizable, resizable and 100% compatible with any browser or any device, including iPhone, iPad and Android smartphones. You can put this cute scroller anywhere you want on your page and/or post, and you can do it in few minutes with an inbuilt short code generator. It’s very easy, and it looks great!

We are using this plugin for WPdiscounts actually, that’s how much we liked it (you can see it in action in almost every review we feature here, like our Clipper review, and also in custom post types like the one we created for Themify). We also decided to do a full Thumbnail Scroller review so we can present this great plugin to our readers, so if you want to know more about this neat scroller, please read on as I will try to explain everything I loved about it.

Besides working perfectly as a standalone WordPress plugin, Thumbnail Scroller is also available in other versions: as a NextGEN template, a jQuery Plugin and as a PHP version, so you will want to make sure you are downloading and using the correct version for your needs. No matter which version you need to use, downloading Thumbnail Scroller will take few minutes, and installing it will take even less.

installation & setup

Using a WordPress plugin and customizing it can be a bit of a problem sometimes, and at other times it can be a huge one, depends on just how complicated everything has been made. Not with Thumbnail scroller. Everything is dead easy, and I’m pretty sure anyone can use and customize it to his needs. You get to choose the general look of your scroller out of a gallery that contain several versions of it, and you can customize every little detail on the one you choose.

Let me just give you a sample of the few simple steps you need to finish in order to have this great plugin up on your website, showing any kind of content you want in any way you want it.

Once you download and install it, you will find your Thumbnail Scroller in your WordPress dashboard menu. When you select it, you will see you got only two clicks here available: Add scroller and Edit Scroller Default Settings. By selecting the editing option, a huge list of styles and editing options appear, and it is very clear that you can play around with just about anything, and choose a custom look of every inch of your new scroller. You can customize your setting for all of the listed below:

general styles & settings

where you can choose the width and height of the scroller, the background color, the sizes and colors of background borders, and also if you want your thumbnails to be showing randomly or in some specific order.

thumbnails styles & settings

where you can customize the thumbnails you add. Every little detail can be changed, including changing the thumbnails position to horizontal or vertical, choosing the background color of the thumbnails, as well as the background borders of the thumbnail and the color of these borders, you can change the thumbnail spacing, the margin top, right, bottom and left; change the thumbnails padding top, bottom, right and left, and you can choose if you want to display the thumbnail info AND if you want to display it, how you want it to be displayed!

styles & settings for a thumbnail

this is where you can customize ALL the details of your thumbnails, such as: selecting a file for the thumbnail loader, selecting the thumbnail width, height, the thumbnail alpha, the Alpha hover, the size and color of the thumbnail borders and padding top, bottom, right and left.

thumbnails navigation styles & settings

where you can choose your thumbnails navigation easing, enable thumbnails loop, mouse navigation, scroll navigation, scroll position and size, as well as scroll scrub color and scroll bar color. You get to choose thumbnail navigation arrows number items slide and the speed of the arrows. You can also choose and put your own images as: a previous button image, previous button hover image, previous button disabled image, etc.

lightbox styles and settings

now this is where you can enable the light box on your thumbnail scroller and make it even more attractive. You can choose the display time, the light box window color, the file for your light box loader, and of course you can choose the color and sizes of the background, the borders, the caption text, the margins and the padding.

lightbox navigation styles & settings

here you can choose your own image for any of the following: previous button, previous button hover image, next button, next button hover image, navigation close button and the hover image for navigation close. Just like in the previously explained settings, you can choose your background color here as well, just like the text color and you can setup your light box navigation time and swipe.

tooltip styles & settings

choose your tooltip background color, stroke color and text color

label styles & settings

choose the position and visibility of the label, as well as the text, Alpha and background color.

slideshow settings

allows you to enable the slideshow and set the time and loop of it.

Checkout the screenshots of all Thumbnail Scroller settings in the gallery below, which is of course powered by this fabulous plugin!

Wow! Did you see all that? When I said you could customize every little detail of the scroller, you didn’t quite believe me, did you now?

I absolutely adore customizing stuff to my own taste and liking, but I’m no programmer and when I encounter a complicated customization, I rather have someone else do it for me, but with Thumbnail Scroller, it’s all fun and games. Once you start changing all those styles, colors, adding the images, you won’t be able to stop until you make every tiny detail perfect! The best part is – you will be able to edit, change and customize it all, without any difficulties. Once you are finished, a short code will be generated within seconds and voila! Just copy the code anywhere you want to on your webpage and you’re done! Well, at least until you decide it’s time to play around a little more and change stuff here and there, or change your scroller entirely and make it look like a brand new one when you get tired of the one you set up in the beginning!

examples

Below you can find a screenshot of several examples of how to use the scroller. The first example is the standard configuration of the scroller. You can make it look a bit cuter and customized by changing the Thumbnail Scroller style, add a scroll bar or/and use the slideshow option, as you can see in the second example. In the 3rd example you see lightbox can be used to create an image scroller. You can easily set the number of images you want to present, and they will slide when you click the arrows. You have 32 different easing effects to choose out of, and by adding one of them you can navigate through Thumbnail Scroller using the mouse only (example 4). If you have a website with a small width, you can make your Thumbnail Scroller scroll vertically as you can see in the 5th example, saving you a lot of space and still making the content and thumbnails look great.

These are just few examples of how you can use your Thumbnail Scroller, but keep in mind that you can change and edit everything, and make it look just as you want it to. If you want to see these samples in real live action and play around with them click here!

features

Thumbnail Scroller is one of the best solutions for a WordPress post gallery, and you will know why when you see all the great features it has! Let’s name just some of them:

• A completely responsive layout (meaning it looks great in all browsers and devices)
• Each scroller can be customized individually and can be changed to be used as a simple image scroller
• You can add embed videos from YouTube & Vimeo
• You can easily add Flash or HTML into the thumbnails or into the lightbox
• Design your own navigation buttons and use them as you please; you can also add links to your thumbnails
• An unlimited amount of images can be added to your scroller and you can display an unlimited number of scrollers to your website!
• You can browse the scroller using just one finger when you are seeing it on a touchscreen device
• Widget support
• Ajax admin
• A simple drag & drop to sort your images and drag & release to crop your thumbnails
• And as already said: YOU CAN CHANGE EVERYTHING ON IT AND ADJUST IT TO YOUR OWN TASTE, no matter if it’s about changing color, style, border style, anything you want to do with your Thumbnail Scroller is completely doable.

pricing & licensing info

You can buy Thumbnail Scroller in 4 flavors: the standalone WordPress plugin we’ve described in this review, as a template for the NextGEN WordPress gallery plugin, as a jQuery plugin and a PHP version. Click the appropriate button below for more information or buying ThumbnailScroller:

live front- and backend previews

Click the front-end demo button below to see a live preview of the Thumbnail Scroller plugin, or click the back-end demo button to play with the plugin and it’s features (scroll to “Admin Demo“).

the bottom line

I have no intention of boring you with technicalities any more, and quite frankly, I don’t think you need any more explanations. There is a demo version on their site you can check it all by yourself and try out all the stuff we just talked about, or you can watch a video and see the setup step by step. Again, I don’t think you will need any special instructions, it’s all there, you will know what to do once you open the editing options.

I love Thumbnail Scroller and I surely will continue using it on all our sites. I’m sure you’ll love it too! Give it a try, you will have so much fun customizing it, and you will love the results, I promise!