Footer with next/previous posts

Maybe I don’t understand the question, sorry in that case.

But can’t you just retrieve the last 6 posts excluding the current? Something like:

global $post;

$footer_posts = wp_get_recent_posts( array('post_status' => 'publish', 'posts_per_page' => '6', 'exclude' => $post->ID), 1 );

if ( ! empty($footer_posts) ) { foreach ( $footer_posts as $post ) {
  setup_postdata($post);
  echo '<div style="float:left; margin-left:20px;">';
  echo '<a href="' . get_permalink() . '">';
  the_post_thumbnail('thumb');
  echo '<br /><h4 style="text-align:center;">' . get_the_title() . '</h4></a>';
  echo '</div>';
} }

wp_reset_postdata();