It seems some of the styling is tied to my wordpress theme CSS. Is that the case?

Yes, that’s true. The CSS for SmoothGallery doesn’t change very much - this way it should integrate seamlessly into most themes. If you really need to change something, make sure to be as specific as you can with new rules, i.e. don’t add a stanza just for h3 but for #myGallery .imageElement h3. With the latter you’ll be able to overwrite the CSS of your theme.

On another note, speaking of options, it would be great if all these options could be configured from WordPress admin panel directly, without having to deal with the config.php file.

Currently you’ll have to change something in the config.php if you’d like to integrate a SmoothGallery into your theme. Maybe this gets replaced with a widget that you can put into your sidebar in the future, but I haven’t figured this out yet.
The next release of this plugin adds a shortcode that generates the markup for the gallery. You just upload the images via WordPress, adjust the title, caption and description, add [smoothgallery] somewhere into your content and the SmoothGallery will show up. If you decide to change the description of an image later, the gallery will reflect this immediately.
I’m not really convinced by idea that every plugin should have its own admin panel. If WordPress offers a way to do things, I don’t think I should reimplement this. I admit that it’s not that easy to integrate the gallery into your theme - let’s see whether we can use a widget for that. For everything else integration should be as easy as possible, no admin panel, no config files, only the shortcode and some options in the custom fields.
But stay tuned, I’m redesigning this page and everything else, that’s connected with this plugin to describe all this in more detail.

Thanks for the quick reply. I already tried to edit this CSS but it won’t apply most of my changes.

It seems some of the styling is tied to my wordpress theme CSS. Is that the case? For example, when smoothgallery is live and running, I have a top margin of 15px for the h3 tag and I want to get rid of that. When I look at wp-content/plugins/smoothgallery/css, there is nothing showing a top margin at all but I know I have such a style applied in my tags in my theme’s CSS. Does that make sense?

Being able to really customize the style of this great plugin is the only thing that stops me from using it so far.

On another note, speaking of options, it would be great if all these options could be configured from WordPress admin panel directly, without having to deal with the config.php file. Ideally, you would just call smoothgallery in your template with one simple line of code and everything else would be set from the Admin panel (images, titles, descriptions). That is for future releases though

Love this plugin! I have 1 question though…

I am wanting to have an album, with the thumbnails of each gallery, that when the thumbnail is clicked, it opens the smooth slideshow directly. How would I do this? I would also like it to open up in a new page/page template, as the structure needs to be quite different.

Is this possible?

In case you are wondering, all I do is add a PHP if statement in my template to check if I am in the home page or not. If I am in the home page, I only load the JavaScript for SmoothGallery. If I am on any other page, I load all the other JavaScripts. This is working very well for me and should work for you too if you have the same setup. If you need more help, contact me here.