I also ran into this problem (I'm using version 1.1.6). Page navigation would be displayed even if I had only one page worth of albums. For example, I had 9 albums, I had my albums per page set to 12, and the page navigation would show that there were 3 pages. However, if I actually navigated to those pages, they didn't have any albums. Removing $firstPageImages = normalizeColumns('2', '6'); fixed it for me as well. Thanks jackdaw!