Finding the best way of presenting your images online can be overwhelming given the minefield of choices.
A photo gallery plugin is the ideal solution, and fortunately, there are plenty on the market to choose from. Each offers a myriad of features to display your work, all customizable at the touch of a button (or two).
To help narrow your choice down, we’ve curated this list of the five best WordPress photo gallery plugins to help display your images on your website.
1. Envira Gallery
First on our list is the Envira Gallery plugin – a non-technical solution that offers drag-and-drop gallery design. It’s fully responsive, meaning your images will display beautifully on any device. Furthermore, Envira Gallery is fully optimized for fast loading. It represents a slick, quick, and simple solution for showcasing your images.
While Envira Gallery is free to download, there’s also a premium version offering features such as albums, social media integration, gallery templates, tags, deep linking, pagination, and e-commerce integration.
2. Foo Gallery
The Foo Gallery plugin was built with image and video management in mind. While organizing your images into a beautiful gallery is an easy process, there’s also functionality that will appeal to developers. A plus point of Foo Gallery is that it offers high-definition support, outputting high-quality images on displays that cater to it.
What’s more, you can organize your images and videos with the bundled Album extension by simply dragging and dropping to reorder them. You can also get up and running quickly with built-in gallery templates, and can even add your own custom CSS to customize your gallery further.
Foo Gallery is free to download, with premium gallery extensions available.
3. Photo Gallery
Next up is the aptly named Photo Gallery plugin, enabling you to create fully responsive galleries that display within a stylish lightbox. You can view your gallery in a number of ways including thumbnail, slideshow, and compact album views. Photo Gallery also enables you to add and edit images within its interface to fit different views – a neat touch!
Inserting your gallery is just as easy as adding your images to it – a specialist shortcode enables you to place your work almost anywhere on your site.
While the basic Photo Gallery plugin is free to download, there’s also a premium version offering features such as editable themes, additional gallery views, a lightbox, and social media integration.
4. Sell Media
Sell Media is a totally unique photo gallery plugin because of it’s powerful e-commerce integration. Galleries can be customized to show masonry layouts or one, two, three, four and five column grid layouts. Prefer square thumbnails? The “Thumbnail Orientation” option allows you to quickly switch all galleries between square or un-cropped images.
Sell Media is surprisingly a free plugin, but offers a professional version that gives you unlimited access to all of Sell Media’s extensions and 40 WordPress themes. There are tons of features that even give you the ability to sell membership plans to your photos and also sell prints.
5. Jetpack
Finally, we have Jetpack. This popular Swiss Army knife also includes a couple of gallery options. Tiled Galleries enables you to display your work in a number of different styles, including circles, and the popular masonry style. Furthermore, the Gallery Widget enables you to display your work in the sidebar, along with a selection of ready-made styles to choose from.
Of course, with Jetpack being an Automattic-designed plugin, you’re pretty much guaranteed ongoing compatibility with WordPress, along with a number of other benefits and features, such as Photon – a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for your images that’s completely free to access.
Jetpack is free, and is normally installed as standard with WordPress. However, there’s also a subscription option, which starts from $3.50.
Conclusion
Your work deserves stellar design to showcase it to the full. Choosing the right photo gallery plugin enables your photography to effectively represent you on your WordPress website, and goes some way in enticing visitors to part with their hard-earned cash.
In this piece, we’ve offered five of the best photo gallery plugins available:
- Envira Gallery: A responsive gallery plugin with drag-and-drop functionality.
- Foo Gallery: A simple gallery plugin that also offers flexibility if required.
- Photo Gallery: This plugin includes a lightbox, along with various custom layouts.
- Sell Media: A gallery plugin with e-commerce capabilities and over 5 gallery layout options.
- Jetpack: Automattic’s own offering has a number of compatible options for displaying images.
Do you have a favorite photo gallery plugin? Let us know in the comments section below!
Image credit: IgorSaveliev.