I required the ability to have images with thumbnails, captions on the thumbnails and the images, and a simple gallery in content articles for a website I'm building.

Another important feature is the ability to set the size of thumbnails individually, and to control the setup of a gallery independent of the other image thumbnails in the article.

I started out looking for image extensions that worked with EasyImageCaption because that appeared to be the best way to get everything I needed. EasyImageCaption works great! But, I was having a problem finding an image extension that handled the thumbnailing and galleries the way I needed them handled.

After reviewing all that was available, in desperation, I decided to try BK-Thumb because it was the only extension I could find which met all of my requirements. -- Desperation because I needed the functionality, I couldn't find anything else, and BK-Thumb is a three-day old beta release.

Well, it turns out that BK-Thumb worked perfectly. The documentation is complete, helpful, and accurate. When I had a problem getting it to work, there was a statement in the documentation that said, "If you have a problem, try this first." I tried that solution and it worked!

A couple of comments:

1. It is much easier to get BK-Thumb working than it looks from the documentation.

2. Pay attention to the documentation and the excellent examples will lead you through setting it up.

3. I suggest that you start with the "Standard Pop-up" and once you have it installed and working, switch to the pop-up style you want. The popup libraries are dependent on your individual Joomla installation. In my case, the pop-up I chose was the ONLY one that didn't work without doing something special to make it work. Once I knew BK-Thumb was actually working, it about two minutes to get the pop-up I wanted to work. In fact, the instructions told me how to fix it.

This component claims to have installed correctly, but it doesn't actually work.

There is no documentation - The developer refers you to the documentation for a non-Joomla version of QCodo for his Joomla component for QCubed.

I wasted time reviewing the installation, the documentation which isn't really for this tool, and reading code.

When I realized that I could waste many more hours guessing how to set path constants or reading code to figure it out and I might not get it working at all, I decided to move on to another tool that would allow me to get my work done: Hand-coding the CRUD, forms, and admin interface for the needed application using a library of coding examples we've built up over the years.

My suspicion is that the component would probably work if I knew what constants I needed to define to match the intended directory structure.

eXtplorer gets a low rating because we can no longer get it to work. In the past, it has installed easily and worked flawlessly. No more.

When we install it now, it claims to have installed correctly. When we try to use it we get the infamous error which has been well documented here, in the Joomla forums, and which has been ignored by the developer.

Please note that we run Joomla on three different Linux server environments, one of which is cPanel. We tried every fix mentioned here or in the forums. Nothing worked. In fact, when we reviewed all of the setup issues such as file and directory permissions, archives that didn't get expanded, etc., in every case and on every platform, none of these issues was the problem, and nothing had to be changed.

Finally, we gave up and are now using ninjaXplorer, which we have discovered we prefer because it actually installs, works flawlessly, and seems to use less system resources than eXtplorer on the sites where we have used it.

In fact, we are uninstalling all working copies of eXtplorer and installing ninjaXplorer as we do our update to the latest Joomla 1.5.X.

Great tool. Actually installs and works. Easy to use.

Compare with eXtplorer - which has had install problems unaddressed by the developer since last year and you will understand why I commented "Actually installs and works."

Seems to be faster than eXtplorer.

Just installed on Joomla 1.5.9.

Works great. Simply to use. Just the right amount of functionality and no more. Very well thought out.

Apparently, there's an incompatibility with 1.5.9 - When you have more than 4 articles that use mavikThumbnails, the website theme gets fried for that category and when you go to the blog-view, it shows only one article in the upper-left hand corner of the browser window.

I reported this to Vitaliy and he fixed it for me -- immediately.

I don't know what he did to fix it, but I'm sure he'll report it here for others who may have the problem.