5 Best Photo Gallery Plugins – WordPress

There is an English idiom, “An image is worth of thousand words.” Images or Photos can convey your message and connect with your target audience more effectively.

Images work especially great if you highlight the main message at the photo editing stage with the help of different techniques.

In case you lack time or skills to make such delicate adjustments, you can always delegate the task to photo enhancement services.

If you own a website, photos are important to make your site more attractive. But sometimes managing photos in the gallery can be overwhelming and messy.

Though WordPress comes with a built-in photo gallery feature, it lacks functionality and aesthetic appeal.

As a result, you will need to find an alternative solution for your photo gallery.

There are many WordPress photo gallery plugins out there that have amazing features to help you organize and manage photos.

However, most of these plugins have three common problems.

1. Most photo gallery plugins will slow down your website. There is a lack of quality in the coding base of many such plugins which can hamper your site performance severely.
   
2. Some of these plugins jumble up too many features in one interface, thus making them more complicated to use. More features are good, but only if they are organized. It takes a long time to learn many of these plugins which is a waste of time. (Although the main reason is a lack of proper guidance.)
   
3. Most of these plugins are not responsive. Your photo galleries might get disoriented on different devices.

These are serious issues and it’s hard to detect which plugin to trust. However, let me make it easier for you.

I have listed the 5 best photo gallery plugins for WordPress that are comparatively better than all other photo gallery plugins and have none of the issues I mentioned earlier.

While making this list, we considered problems most of the plugins face, how often the authors update plugins, and the number of active installs, and selected the best five out there.

Let’s dive into it.

These are the top three photo gallery plugins I personally recommend.

Now let me show you three more plugins that are pretty good if you don’t find the previous three suitable for you.

5. Photo Gallery By 10Web

Photo Gallery will take your gallery to a whole new level.

The plugin is fully responsive with advanced functionalities. It uses a user-friendly interface which makes it easy to use.

The Photo Gallery is the leading plugin for creating beautiful mobile-friendly galleries within a few minutes.

You can add a photo gallery and album, to post and page, providing detailed gallery descriptions and tags, and add an audio track to your image slider.

This plugin also has video support on it. It will enable you to create a Youtube gallery or Vimeo video gallery.

This plugin has one special feature. It adds an e-commerce add-on to their add-on shop with which you can sell digital photos and prints.

Free Version Of 10Web

If you’re looking for a user-friendly and feature-rich plugin to add responsive galleries and albums to your website, the Photo Gallery plugin is a suitable option for you.

It adds the “Photo Gallery” option to your WordPress dashboard. From there you can add a gallery the same way you add a post.

The free version of the 10Web Photo Gallery plugin allows you to:

• Customizable Views – The photo Gallery provides some view options to organize your galleries and albums in beautiful views, including Slideshow, Thumbnails, Image Browser, Extended, and Compact Albums.
• Unlimited Photo, Gallery, and Albums – With this plugin, you can have as many galleries and albums as you want.
• Audio and Video Support – The Image Gallery plugin allows you to include both videos and images within a single gallery.  It will enable you to create YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram, Flickr, or Dailymotion videos within Galleries.

And a lot more.

Active Installations: 10web Photo Gallery currently has 300,000+ active installations on the WordPress repository and has more than 12,657,975+ downloads till now.

Rating: 10Web Photo Gallery has a 4.5 out of 5 stars rating by 1,144+ users.

Photo Gallery by 10Web Pro

The Photo Gallery plugin by 10Web is right now one of the leading plugin choices for photographers, visual artists, and imaging professionals.

It is also highly configurable and extendable for developers or freelancers.

Useful Premium Features of the Photo Gallery plugin:

• Advanced Lightbox – The photo Gallery plugin provides a customizable lightbox with 15 lightbox transition effects, full-width view options, and film strips.
• Gallery Views – In the premium version of Photo Gallery access to views like Thumbnails, Masonry, Mosaic, Slideshow, Image Browser, Carousel, Blog Style, and more.
• Gallery Groups and Tags – The photo Gallery presents multiple galleries in well-organized gallery groups and organize your photos by adding tags to them.
• Instagram Integration – You can easily Import images from Instagram with just one click.
• Social Sharing – With the Premium version you can allow users to share photos on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and Tumblr with social sharing buttons.

Price: The 10Web Photo Gallery pro pricing plan starts from $30/year.

Bonus: A Couple of WordPress Plugins For Images, Videos, and Media Files

You’ve already learned about the best image gallery plugins for WordPress in this article.

Now I’ll tell you about a couple of good WordPress plugins that will help you to edit, optimize, and manage the images, videos, and other media files of your WordPress website.

Let’s have a look at them.

i. WP Paint

WP Paint is an HTML5 WordPress Image Editor plugin. It comes with an intuitive interface paralleling popular Desktop-based image editing software. 

WP Paint Pro offers a wide variety of Image Editing, Photo Manipulation, and Photo Editing Tools and Features.

The WP Paint plugin also comes with a free version that you can try from WordPress.org.

Some of the common features in both the free and pro versions are:

Pro Features Include: 

Click here to check out the WP Paint plugin.

ii. Portfolio Designer WordPress Plugin

Portfolio Designer is an all-in-one plugin to create stunning portfolios, galleries, showcases, and projects in an engaging layout.

It offers to create a new custom post type with audio or video thumbnails. The plugin is fully supported with WooCommerce, so you can build a portfolio where a user can add the selling details. It is a completely responsive and mobile-friendly gallery plugin.

Free Version of Portfolio Designer:

Portfolio Designer Lite allows the creation of a user-friendly portfolio with 2 default layout styles.

The free version of the plugin contains advanced features such as:

• 4 Different Content Positions – Overlay on Image, Bottom of Image, Left Side of Image, Right Side of Image.
• 18 Effective Hover Effects – Zoom Out, Overlay Slide, Corner Slide, Rotating Zoom Out, etc.
• Manage your ‘Show All’ text with ‘Filter Settings’.
• Square/Circle social share buttons.
• Alternative Background color selection for posts.

And many more.

Pro Version of Portfolio Designer:

The premium version of the plugin has intuitive features that make your gallery more impressive. It is a highly flexible plugin that a user can add a look and feel according to the website layout.

Moreover, a feature-rich plugin comprises a bunch of useful features:

• It comes with 50+ powerful hover effects using CSS3 and HTML5.
• The plugin has unlimited layout style with the help of Grid layout, Masonry layout, Slider layout and Justify layout, and Slideshow Layout.
• Import or Export your portfolio layouts easily for future usage.
• It has 4 in-built Popup boxes.

Portfolio Designer is an easy-to-use plugin with no expertise needed. Even a beginner can also easily use it on a WordPress website.

iii. EmbedSocial’s Social Media Plugin

EmbedSocial is an all-in-one platform that helps you showcase photos, reviews, stories, or feeds from social networks right on your website.

This platform integrates your social media presence with your website and makes it more dynamic and user-centric.

This is what EmbedSocial’s WordPress social media plugin consists of:

EmbedAlbum

This tool allows you to easily display your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram photos on your website using simple copy/paste codes.

EmbedFeed

This tool helps you embed the entire Facebook and Instagram Feed on your website. You can showcase your Facebook or Instagram images and posts for your website visitors on a beautiful web feed.

EmbedReviews

EmbedReviews is a platform for managing your social reviews. It allows you to generate and display reviews from Facebook, Google My Business, and other sources on any website.

EmbedStories

This is an advanced tool that will allow you to fetch and embed your Instagram stories on your WordPress website using simple shortcodes.

Please note that the official WordPress plugin works for all EmbedSocial tools, so you’ll never need to install or maintain multiple plugins.

Feel free to check their free and paid versions to see what fits your needs best.

iv. Qi Addons for Elementor

Qi Addons for Elementor is a brand new, feature-rich Elementor addon that comes packed with 60 super practical widgets. These widgets will not only visually upgrade your website but also uplift its functionalities. 

What makes Qi special is its ease of use. You can change the widget’s settings without leaving the Elementor editor – everything can be adjusted within the selected widget itself. Also, every change can be seen instantly. 

When it comes to image gallery functionalities and layouts, this plugin won’t disappoint you either. Choose between standard galleries, masonry and Pinterest layouts, card galleries, and more. 

Qi offers some great customization options and has practical video tutorials that demonstrate some of the various styles you can achieve. 

Besides beautiful gallery widgets, this plugin offers many other elements that allow you to showcase your images in an eye-catching way including image sliders, before/after comparison sliders, parallax showcases, and more.

Free Version of Portfolio Designer:

So, let’s sum up the most important features of the Qi Addons for the Elementor plugin:

The free version of the plugin contains advanced features such as:

• It’s made for the extremely popular Elementor page builder. 
• It’s fully responsive and highly flexible so your galleries will look stunning on different screen sizes. 
•  It allows you to choose between different layouts and set the number of columns.
• There are different hover effects and color overlay options that will make your image galleries more interactive.
• It lets you easily create captivating parallax sections

And many more.

Conclusion

You can select a couple of images within your WordPress media library and turn them into an image gallery without using any photo gallery plugin.

The problem is that this default WordPress photo gallery lacks important functionalities like – keeping the gallery and pictures responsive on mobile devices, opening them during a lightbox popup, showing them as a slideshow, etc.

An image gallery plugin isn’t required only by photobloggers any longer right now.

Most WordPress sites and blogs now use multiple images to showcase their services, products, and everything else.

The simplest way to showcase these images is by using a photo gallery plugin so your viewers can easily navigate them.

The photo gallery plugins I’ve mentioned above can help you to make attractive and appealing galleries for your website.

You can check them out and choose the one that has a comfortable user interface and the right features you require.

One thing I can assure you is that you can rely on any of these photo gallery plugins to give you quality output.

Did you use any of these photo gallery plugins before? Or, did we miss any plugins that you think should be on the list? What is your experience?

Share with us in the comments.