NextGEN Gallery is unusual among WordPress gallery plugins because it stores its data in dedicated tables rather than wp_posts: wp_ngg_gallery for galleries, wp_ngg_pictures for individual image rows with file, alt text, description, exclude flag, and tag references, and wp_ngg_album for album bundles. The default admin shows each table on its own screen with limited cross-filtering.

SleekView Charts reads ngg_gallery, ngg_pictures, and ngg_album directly and turns them into a configurable dashboard. Number cards count total galleries and total pictures across the library. Pie cards split pictures by alt-text coverage or exclude flag. Bar cards rank galleries by picture count or view count. Area cards trace gallery growth or view trend across the year.

Every card reads through the same custom tables NextGEN already maintains, so the lightbox, the display types, and any cache layer continue to behave normally. The dashboard sits next to SleekView's table view, sharing filters and data sources.

NextGEN Gallery has been a staple of WordPress photography sites for over a decade, and its decision to store galleries, pictures, and albums in dedicated custom tables paid off at scale: queries run against indexed columns even on large catalogs, and the data shape is ideal for aggregation. The cost is that the catalog lives in tables the standard WP admin does not surface as charts. The default NextGEN admin shows each table on its own screen and the picture list is paginated per gallery, so cross-cutting questions like how many pictures across the entire library are missing alt text or what the monthly catalog growth has looked like need custom SQL or hours of clicking.

SleekView Charts reads the same custom tables and gives the catalog one dashboard. Photographers run delivery audits in seconds, editorial teams close accessibility gaps across thousands of pictures in a single pass, and agencies maintaining legacy sites finally have the chart layer the long-running catalog deserves.