This plugin provides a search widget, which can be found in the WordPress backend under Design -> Widgets:

You can use this widget to define one or more searchboxes, each with individual settings. These searchboxes can be placed in sidebars, headers and/or footers. The widget provides a graphical interface for defining its search parameters:

These parameters are defined in more detail further down this page.

The widget will place a searchbox at the assigned location (sidebar, header, footer). The design of this searchbox will heavily depend on your chosen theme for styling. You may need some CSS customization to get the styling you are looking for. On the plugin settings page you can choose between two stylings for the searchbox:

The most difficult part is to style the magnifying glass in the correct size, in particular if your theme is responsive and dynamically adjusts sizes. In certain situations it might be best to hide the magnifying glass by CSS customization completely.

Entering a search text in the generated searchbox will initiate a search according to the parameter settings in the widget.  See qualified search examples for a description of possible search functions. The search will generate a result list of image ids in NextGEN galleries. This result list will be presented on a default search landing page. This landing page is automatically generated by the plugin upon installation and is documented on the plugins setting page:

The shown edit link will take you to the search landing page in edit mode. Here you can customize the style of the result list, see display search result list.

The widget supports the following parameters for customizing the search:

Plugin visibility: You can define different searches for logged in users and public users. The resulting searchbox is only visible for the indicated users. You can either select public users, logged in users or both. If you select both, the widget search box will be visible to all users, and all users will have the same search parameters applied to their search.  If you only select public user, the searchbox will only be visible to public users, not to logged in users. If you only select logged in users, the searchbox will only be visible to logged in users, not to public users.

The title will only show up in the widget definition by default. Ticking ’show title in widget‘ will also display the title above the generated searchbox.

The placeholder text will be shown in the searchbox as an information for the users.

The list number of listed images parameter will limit the size of the result list. You can set this limit differently for logged in users and for public users. If the search would generate more resulting images, it will be documented on the search result page.

The mimimum size of search string will prevent users from entering a very short search string (in order to find all images).

Here you can mark in which image metadata fields the search should be carried out. Including tags will make the search a bit more complex, because tags are internally stored in different WordPress tables.

Here you define the scope of the entered search.

Either you search in all galleries (which will not specify any gallery) or you search only in a list of specific galleries. Here the provided list of albums, if defined, will be exploded to a list of contained galleries. This gallery list will then be merged with the list of explicitly listed galleries, if defined. The resulting gallery list will be passed to the search execution as a constraint.

Here you define the restrictions of the entered search.

If no galleries are excluded, there are no restrictions. Otherwise there will be a list of excluded galleries (albums again will be exploded to galleries). If the search is defined for all galleries above, this exclusion list will be passed to the search as an additional restriction. If the search above defines a list of search galleries, this search gallery list is possibly shortened by the excluded gallery list, if both lists contain common galleries.

This field list specifies the image metadata fields, which shall be shown in the search result list. However, this only applies if the search result list is displayed as a single image list or as a linked image list. If you use a native NextGEN Gallery display type, only the native NextGEN Gallery fields can be documented.