Top 5 WordPress Gallery Plugins to Showcase Your Creative Work

When it comes to showcasing your work, there’s no better option than a gallery. Fluid and responsive, yet easy to navigate, WordPress galleries give you the freedom you need to express yourself.

And while WordPress comes with a gallery function built in, it’s rather rudimentary at best and doesn’t let you customize much about it. Fortunately, plugin authors have stepped up to the challenge to create WordPress gallery plugins that combine form and functionality to create beautiful, seamless and fast-loading galleries that will truly make your site shine!

NextGEN Gallery

Designed by photographers for photographers, NextGEN Gallery is one of the most popular WordPress gallery plugins online today, with over a million active installations. Where NextGEN truly shines, is not just that it displays your photos in a gallery style, but how easily it makes organizing and managing them. You can create an unlimited number of albums as well as include an unlimited number of photos in each album.

In addition, there are five different gallery demos, including a browser slideshow, a compact album, and a thumbnail gallery among others. You can use the slideshow feature to transition between images, giving your gallery a true museum-quality feel. NextGEN Gallery also has a premium version available which includes some additional features like the ability to add a lightbox-style gallery as well as premium-level support. For the basic gallery plugin, however, there is no charge.

Modula Gallery

Modula is a WordPress gallery plugin like no other. If you’ve ever wished that you could make your gallery stand out with images of different widths and heights, just like an actual gallery, this is the gallery plugin you’ve been looking for. Modula is even easy for non-technical users to understand. Just drag and drop your photos into it, then click and drag to resize the image any way you like. Modula is smart enough to ensure that the resulting layout looks great on any device.

Plus, Modula loads fast, so you won’t have to worry about this unique WordPress gallery plugin slowing down your site! Unlike NextGEN, however, Modula doesn’t have a free version, but the basic version of the plugin starts at $29, which is a drop in the bucket compared to the features and functionality you get!

FooGallery

The oddly-named FooGallery is an excellent WordPress gallery plugin not just for photos, but also videos. It comes with six different gallery options in the free version with an additional three in the pro version. What makes this gallery plugin unique is the fact that there are so many ways to customize it and make it your own, that you’ll have a blast doing it!

FooGallery was made to be user friendly right out of the box, so you can easily drag, drop, reorder and shuffle around your images while resizing them to your heart’s content. In addition, the instant previews feature lets you see exactly what your gallery will look like before you even save it, so you don’t need to navigate away from the site just to preview your gallery’s layout.

You can even pull images and videos from other sources in the premium version, so if you want to make a mix of your photography and videos, for example, FooGallery can make it happen for you, easily and efficiently.

Envira Gallery

Envira Gallery is a freemium plugin, meaning the lite version won’t cost you anything, but to get advanced features, it carries a hefty $99 price tag. That can seem like a lot to pay for a plugin, but when you consider the many features that come with the pro version, you’ll see that it’s a must for professional photographers.

Where Envira Gallery truly shines is that it allows you to easily make your photos shareable and purchasable right from within the gallery itself, if you wish. Advanced, yet easy-to-use features like deep linking (for search engine optimization benefits) and watermarking (to prevent theft) are all integral parts of getting your work noticed by the search engines, yet still making it difficult for thieves to steal your style. Envira blends the best of both worlds in one easy to use plugin that’s well-documented and easy for even non-coding professionals to enjoy.

Photo Gallery by 10Web

Photo Gallery by 10Web is, right after NextGEN Gallery, the second most-downloaded WordPress gallery plugin. The free version is rather scant on features but the paid version, at $30, includes a lot more options. If you just want a simple, basic WordPress photo gallery, this plugin will take care of it, but if you need something a bit more robust and don’t want to fork over a ton of cash, the premium version is definitely worth considering.

For example, through the premium version, you can make a wide range of gallery styles, and even display Facebook photo albums. You can also sell your photos or videos as digital goods and watermark them to prevent theft. The built-in display styles look great on any device and are a creative way to showcase your work that doesn’t bog down your site with slow loading times. For a decent photo gallery plugin that doesn’t include all the bells and whistles, this is a nice, simple and powerful little gallery tool.

Managing Your WordPress Gallery

If you’ve decided on a WordPress photo gallery plugin, the next step is getting it up and running. But this is where many users hit a wall. How do I install and customize my gallery plugin? How do I add photos and create albums? I have a ton of photos or videos on my camera and I need help importing them. Can anyone help me manage or maintain my WordPress gallery?

Not to worry! At WPDandy, we specialize in helping maintain and manage WordPress blogs, photo galleries and much more. We’ll do more than install your plugin, we’ll make it look great. We do much more than just plugin installation and customization. Trust our WordPress experts to help make all the changes you’d like to your website for one flat fee. From easy administrative dashboard management to having your own developer on-call and ready to help you take your WordPress site to the next level, you can count on WPDandy for all your WordPress needs.