Plugins are one of the best features about using WordPress for your blog, and there are a lot of great options out there for adding a photo gallery to your site. We went ahead and tested a few of the best-rated options on the WordPress plugin registry, so that you can quickly find the best one for you.
Here’s what we found:
Table of Contents
Best WordPress Plugin For Photo Gallery
Nexcess™ Is Now Part Of The Liquid Web™ Family
Find all your favorite content for WordPress and WooCommerce here on Nexcess.net
Whether you’re a travel blogger, food blogger or fashion blogger showing off vacation spots, delicious meals, and outfit choices, or you’re a photographer, destination, or retail shop highlighting your brand experience, at some point you’re going need to add a gallery of photos or several photo galleries to your WordPress website.
And, because you know website performance and page load speed affects search engine rankings and how long a visitor stays on your site, you need a robust photo gallery solution that keeps your site running fast.
We put together the five best WordPress plugins for photos and videos.
The Five Best WordPress Photo Gallery Plugins
Here are the five best WordPress gallery plugins you should consider (in no particular order):
1. NextGEN Gallery
NextGEN Gallery is one of the oldest image gallery plugins in the WordPress plugin repository and one of the most downloaded. This freemium plugin is harder to use than some of the other WordPress photo gallery options listed, the user interface isn’t as seamless and intuitive, and there is a learning curve, but the free version is robust and includes features only available in the premium version of other plugins.
The free version of NextGEN provides two main gallery styles (slideshows and thumbnail galleries) and two album styles (compact and extended), all of which come with a wide array of options for controlling size, style, timing, transitions, controls, lightbox effects, and more.
The NextGen Gallery Extensions add more features, including:
- Additional gallery styles
- Social sharing
- Image comments
- Deep linking for lightbox galleries
- eCommerce integration for selling photos
- Image protection like preventing image downloads and adding watermarks
PRICE: NextGen Gallery is free. The premium extensions range in price from $79 to $139 based on the features you need.Subscribe to the Liquid Web weekly newsletter to get more WordPress content for bloggers sent straight to your inbox.
2. Modula Gallery
Modula Gallery is a new freemium gallery plugin that makes it easy to build stunning lightbox galleries, masonry grids, custom grids and more in no more than a few clicks right from the WordPress dashboard. It’s perfect for WordPress site owners who want to create beautiful galleries without a lot of work or technical requirements.
This plugin gives you the power to choose everything from the height and width of your responsive image gallery down to the resizing of individual images within the container. It also includes twelve cross-browser compatible hover effects that work perfectly on mobile devices along with six easy-to-use lightbox styles that seamlessly integrate with your galleries
The Modula Pro premium version adds more features, including:
- Increased number of images per gallery
- Add videos to your galleries with the premium Modula Video Extension
- Let visitors sort through your gallery by applying filters
- Additional lightbox styles and effects
- Image loading animations
- Custom CSS options
PRICE: Module Lite is free. Module Pro starts at $29 for a single site, $49 for two sites, and $99 for unlimited sites.
3. Foo Gallery
Foo Gallery is another freemium WordPress plugin that lets you easily add responsive photo galleries to your website using an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. The Foo Gallery custom widget that can display galleries in any widget-ready area of your website. Additionally, the new Gutenberg block includes live previews of your galleries, while the plugin has built-in support for higher quality thumbnails on retina-enabled displays. It also includes the lazy loading of images, several different gallery templates, custom CSS options, and more.
The Foo Gallery Pro premium version adds more features, including:
- 11 Hover effect presets
- Media categories and tags and gallery filtering
- Additional gallery templates and pagination options
- Infinite scroll
- The ability to create video galleries
- Bulk copy gallery settings
PRICE: Foo Gallery is free. The premium version, Foo Gallery Pro starts at $49 for a single site.
4. Envira Gallery
Envira Gallery is a freemium WordPress gallery plugin that makes adding a photo gallery to your site fast even if you’re a beginner. The free Lite version gives you control over the number of columns in your gallery, the lightbox, and lazy loading of images and even has some basic social sharing options. The easy to use drag-and-drop gallery builder is responsive so your grid or masonry galleries will look good on devices of all sizes.
The Envira Gallery premium versions add more features including:
- Additional gallery templates and display options
- Image protection like preventing image downloads, adding watermarks, and adding passwords to galleries.
- WooCommerce integration for selling photos
- Social media integration and the ability to import images from Instagram
- The ability to create video galleries
- Deep linking and pagination for large galleries
- Lightroom integration to sync photo galleries with Adobe Lightroom collections
PRICE: Envira Gallery Lite is free. The premium version starts at $29 for those who are just getting started, but if you want all of the gallery features, the Pro package is $99.
5. Photo Gallery
Photo Gallery is a freemium gallery plugin for WordPress that allows you to create simple photo galleries, photo albums, and galleries from embedded videos. It also includes support for videos hosted on sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and Instagram and widgets to display your albums. This plugin is excessive for a site owner who just wants to create beautiful photo galleries. Also, the best gallery layouts, like masonry and mosaic, are only available in the premium version.
The Photo Gallery premium version adds more features, including:
- Additional gallery styles
- eCommerce integration with Paypal and Stripe
- 15 slideshow effects
- Social sharing and Instagram integration
- Image commenting
- Mix-and-match galleries with both images and videos
- Facebook integration to display Facebook photos and videos
PRICE: Photo Gallery is free. The premium versions range from $30 for the Basic option to $100 for the Plugins Bundle.
BONUS: Jetpack
Jetpack is a free, multi-purpose WordPress plugin from Automattic that adds WordPress.com features to self-hosted WordPress sites.
Jetpack’s Tiled Galleries module allows you to display images in a rectangular mosaic, a square mosaic, and a circular grid within the native WordPress media library. It’s a great option if you don’t need the robust features of the more robust gallery options listed above or you’re already using Jetpack on your site. Also, if you use a lot of images on your website and don’t have a CDN, Jetpack’s Site Accelerator (formerly Photon) helps pages load faster by leveraging the WordPress.com CDN.
best wordpress gallery plugin free
NextGEN Gallery
Currently, one of he most popular gallery plugins for WordPress, with over 1 million active installs and 14 million downloads (and counting).
It offers a complete management system for your galleries (similar to how managing posts and pages works). You can batch upload, manage individual images, edit thumbnails, group galleries into albums, and much more.
GET NEXTGEN GALLERY
Envira Gallery Lite
Another very popular and quality WordPress gallery plugin. This one is geared at delivering the easiest-to-use interface possible. Everything works with drag-and-drop, and you also get various gallery templates to make your experience even more hassle-free.
Every gallery you build with this plugin will be mobile-responsive, and will have built-in social sharing. Lastly, you can import Instagram images into your galleries too.
GET ENVIRA GALLERY LITE
Modula
Modula Grid Gallery Lite is a beginner-friendly gallery plugin that lets you create responsive, stylish galleries in just a few seconds using drag and drop.
While the gallery wizard does help you get up and running quickly, you can also optionally dig into more advanced settings to add lightbox galleries, image effects, and lots more.
For even more functionality, like gallery filtering, you can consider upgrading to the Pro version.
GET MODULA
Huge-IT Image Gallery
A very interesting gallery plugin that handles your images somewhat differently than anything else on this list. Apart from the various gallery layouts available, you also get to use custom titles and descriptions that get shown alongside your images.
With this plugin, you can display your images inside a grid layout, a masonry layout, you can use different sliders, and you also get a nice pop-up/lightbox functionality.
GET HUGE-IT IMAGE GALLERY
Gallery
Even though the name of this gallery plugin for WordPress could suggest otherwise, this is actually a quite advanced tool. It delivers a range of features and many possibilities regarding the appearance and behavior of your image galleries.
You can use Gallery to create both image and video galleries (works with YouTube and Vimeo), there are great editing tools, and every gallery is responsive (looks great on all devices). Lastly, there are additional features if you go for the pro version.
Conclusion
Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.
Check out other publications to gain access to more digital resources if you are just starting out with Flux Resource.
Also contact us today to optimize your business(s)/Brand(s) for Search Engines