Implications of switching from one Gallery Plugin to another.

[williampatton]

Most of my WordPress sites contain content that is supplemented with galleries. I've been using NextGen Gallery for a majority of them. I now want to switch to another plugin - which would involve recreating the galleries by re-uploading the images and they would be using an improved url structure. The pages receive a lot of traffic from Image Search but the images would have moved. Should I 301 every one of the old image links to the corresponding urls?

The move to the new plugin is part of a content freshness and improvement strategy on some of the older pages but it also gives a massive UX boost to the pages which is very welcome.

What do you think is the best course of action in this content removal/replacement situation?

[kadesmith]

Your suggestion of 301's on the old to the new is the best if it's doable.

[williampatton]

Thanks for the reply. It will be a very hands on job, lot of images to be replaced but if that's what needs done then that's what I'll do. No point in skimping on the work during a content improvement campaign, right haha

To be honest I almost knew already that I'd need to 301 them all - I just wanted there to be another solution, maybe I'll be lucky and find a nice easy rewrite match.

Good to get a second option on this tho. I'm going to hold off marking it as answered for a little while and see if I can get some more input while I prep the job.