14 Best Photo Gallery Plugins for WordPress

14 Best Photo Gallery Plugins for WordPress in 2021

Photos can make your WordPress site more engaging, increasing the chances that people will linger on it and look at the content for longer periods. And, a WordPress photo gallery plugin is an excellent way to keep the photos organized and make it easy for people to browse through them.

Here are 14 of the best photo gallery plugins you should check out and consider adding to your site.

NextGEN Gallery

nextgen wordpress plugin

One of the advantages of this plugin is that it’s been around since 2007 and receives more than a million new downloads per year. The free version of NextGEN gallery allows creating your gallery in either a thumbnail or slideshow format.

There is also an Insert Gallery window that lets users work inside it when adding galleries to their pages instead of dealing with shortcodes. When you need to manage your photos, there are several ways to do so. Try the batch upload feature to make transfers more efficient or see how easy it is to rearrange photos or group them into albums. This is a plugin made with photo enthusiasts in mind.

If you want something more than what the free version offers, paid plans are $79 and up.

Modula Photo Gallery

modula photo gallery plugin

This plugin offers an impressive amount of customization and doesn’t require advanced coding skills. Among the features you can enjoy are:

  • Six lightbox styles
  • 12 built-in hover effects with cross-browser compatibility
  • The ability to resize individual images or change the height and width of a gallery
  • The option to choose the size and color of photo captions

Whether you want a gallery to display wedding photos or snapshots from your recent round-the-world trip, Modula makes it easy to tweak the content so to suit your site and your needs.

Changing the dimensions of a gallery, for example, is as easy as clicking and dragging on the bottom corner. You can use Modula as a free version or opt for a premium plan ranging from $29-99 depending on the tier chosen.

Portfolio Designer Lite

portfolio designer

Portfolio Designer is way more than just a gallery plugin. It is an extremely flexible way to build portfolio galleries to showcase your work as well as any kind of image, photo, or rich media gallery.

The free version offers the popular masonry and grid style layouts with loads of pre-defined effects and animations to make your portfolio/gallery really stand out. Obviously, everything is fully responsive as well.

The paid version of Portfolio Designer goes even further with dozens more effects and layout variations including sliders, justified layouts, infinite scrolling, and much more. Definitely worth a look if you have the budget for a premium plugin.

Envira Gallery

envira gallery plugin

The creators of this plugin believe people should not have to hire developers to put visually pleasing galleries onto their WordPress sites.

When giving this plugin a try, you likely won’t need to spend much time learning your way around the plugin. Look forward to creating a gallery in five minutes or less. Key features of the plugin include:

  • Drag and drop gallery creation
  • Integration with social media feeds and WooCommerce
  • Create slideshows with manual or automatic controls
  • Protect your images with watermarks

Envira Gallery also offers 100-percent optimization for mobile devices and allows deep-linking to individual images for SEO best practices.

Regardless of if you recently started working with photo galleries on WordPress or consider yourself a seasoned expert, this plugin is one that can scale to meet your needs, making it a solid choice. Interested in a premium plan? The paid versions start at $29.

Photo Gallery by 10Web

photo gallery 10web demo

Making your WordPress site mobile-friendly is an excellent way to cater to people who view the content on their smartphones or tablets and not risk making them feel frustrated.

The Photo Gallery by 10Web plugin is specifically for galleries that look great on mobile devices. Use the drag-and-drop functionality to make beautiful galleries without wasting time.

Alternatively, sign up for a premium plan by choosing a tier priced from $30-100. Getting one of those gives you access to ready-made themes for eye-catching results without going through any customization. However, if you prefer something custom-made, that’s possible for your gallery, too.

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There is also a tagging feature for arranging your photos into groups. It’s handy for keeping things organized and giving your gallery some structure.

FooGallery

foo gallery plugin

FooGallery includes a new Gutenberg block editor, making it compatible with a 2018 Gutenberg block editing system that WordPress rolled out.

Use a copy-to-clipboard feature to facilitate using shortcodes when adding galleries, and rely on the drag-and-drop features to rearrange the photos in a gallery. Some of the other perks available to you include:

  • A built-in image library for user-friendly photo management
  • Live previews of images on the administrator side
  • A gallery picker for inserting images
  • Support for high-quality thumbnails on retina-quality displays

The Pro version of FooGallery is $49, and there is a handy chart for comparing the features of the free and paid versions.

Gmedia Photo Gallery

gmedia plugin

Consider this plugin if you primarily want to feature photos in a WordPress gallery but may include video and audio files at some point, too. It includes support for all three types of media. Here are some other advantages of this plugin:

  • Show photos as galleries or albums
  • Create covers for albums to increase the appeal
  • Activate a geolocation feature for pictures to add location-based context
  • Add the gallery shortcode to the post with a single click
  • Works with the native Image Resizer in WordPress

You can also quickly shift images between galleries and make them appear in multiple places by adding tags to the content.

That option makes it more straightforward to manage your photos by putting them in the desired areas without extra clicks. Moreover, set permissions for albums, such as by making specific ones public or only visible to logged-in users.

Although there is a free version of this app, premium version prices begin at $29.99.

Final Tiles Grid Gallery

image grid photo gallery final tiles

Use Final Tiles Grid Gallery to make fully responsive WordPress galleries that adjust the image layout based on a person’s browser or screen size.

Pick from two available layouts and decide on the size of the margins for each image you upload. This plugin works via a concept that doesn’t crop the images and retains the original size when possible. As such, you can rest assured that the images displayed on the screen appear as expected.

If you want to work with the paid features this app offers, pricing starts at $19.99, billed annually. Hover effects for captions and images, as well as WooCommerce support, are some of the extras that come with a premium plan.

Photo Gallery by Supsystic

supsystic photo gallery plugin

Give this WordPress option a try when you’re eager to experiment with numerous types of galleries on your site. Some of the possibilities include a carousel gallery, full-width gallery, gallery with captions and icons, or mosaic gallery, among many others.

Many people arguably think that having all those choices is a good thing, and you may agree, but this plugin might be more than you need if simplicity is your aim.

What other features can you use? Here’s a sampling:

  • Add images to galleries from FTP or social media
  • Use shadow presets to make your images stand out
  • Put a reflected image of your company’s logo on each image to build a branded gallery
  • Include captions with the images to help viewers understand the context

Premium licenses are $39 and up depending on the number of sites using the plugin, but there is a free version too, and it gives you access to many of the features mentioned above.

Essential Grid

essential grid gallery

No matter if your images come from social media, the WordPress gallery or somewhere else, there’s a good chance Essential Grid will help you swiftly show them off in a gallery format. Making custom modifications and selecting your format is simple thanks to the user-friendly and attractive interface.

You can also:

  • Choose the number of columns displayed on desktop or mobile devices
  • Add filtering options to your galleries to help people find the content they most want to see
  • Make a gallery that matches your brand by using the visual skin editor
  • Build skins from scratch, or create one based on an existing skin inside the plugin

This is a paid plugin that costs $34.

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Gallery Bank

gallery bank plugin

Gallery bank is ideal if you have a large number of photos to display and want to avoid the album quantity restrictions imposed by some other plugins. It allows uploading an unlimited number of images, plus add single or multiple galleries to a page using a shortcode.

Here are some of its other features:

  • Right-click protection function to stop people from downloading and saving images without permission
  • Masonry or thumbnail gallery layouts
  • Add a title and description to each photo or album
  • User-friendly image management interface

You can use this plugin for free. Alternatively, the Pro plan starts at 29.99, billed annually. Lifetime licenses are also available. The Pro version gives you more than 200 features, including the ability to make slideshows, add watermarks and try several lightbox styles.

Gallery

gallery plugin

The name of this WordPress plugin gets right to the point by describing its purpose. The plugin has a control panel for picking colors, grid specifics, hover effects, and more, letting you take care of all the necessary tweaks in one place.

Advantages:

  • Create up to three galleries with the free (Lite) version
  • Make animated sliders or lightbox galleries
  • Adjust the rows, columns, and spacing in each gallery
  • Use the color picker to enjoy virtually unlimited shade possibilities for a gallery’s skin

Premium versions of this plugin start at $24 and offer support for Google Maps in a gallery, let you have up to eight columns in a gallery, and pick from more than 10 lightbox options.

Unite Gallery

unite video gallery demo

Unite Gallery is an all-in-one WordPress gallery for photos and videos. Users praise it as giving them flexibility and offering a good buy for the money. You can purchase a license from CodeCanyon for $29.

Here are some of the reasons people likely think it’s a prime option to pursue:

  • Choose from 10 gallery layouts
  • Make adjustments with more than 120 gallery settings
  • Touch-enabled functionality let people control parts of the gallery on touch-sensitive devices, such as smartphones
  • Mix photo and video elements regardless of the gallery style chosen

At first, you may hesitate to buy a plugin that doesn’t have a free version. But, a look at the reviews associated with the product should be enough to show you that it’s a wise investment if you plan to prioritize photos on any WordPress site.

Justified Image Grid

justified image grid gallery demo

This is another plugin sold at CodeCanyon, and it’s one of the best-selling WordPress gallery plugins on the site.

Arrange images in the ways that work best for you, quickly combining images of various sizes. It’s also easy to add captions to the pictures and help viewers understand where you were when you captured the image.

Justified Image Grid also gives you full control over how the plugin works with your galleries. You can embed it to apply to all your existing WordPress images automatically, or customize things as you go along by making changes with the user interface.

The plugin is also mobile-responsive and retina-ready, ensuring that your images look fantastic on an assortment of modern devices.

The plugin costs $27 for a regular license.

PhotoMosaic

photomosaic plugin

This plugin works with the built-in gallery options WordPress offers. You select the name of this plugin as your gallery theme, then get all your uploaded photos transformed into a mosaic-style gallery.

Here are some of the other reasons to consider this plugin:

  • Support for Lazy Loading
  • Ability to customize gallery columns
  • Includes a lightbox component, but also works with lightbox plugins you may already use
  • Option to link images to a URL

You can also make galleries from a list of images or pictures attached to posts. Those choices give you plenty of flexibility when creating your albums.

Install a Gallery Plugin With Confidence

With so many WordPress photo gallery plugins available, it can be difficult to determine the ones worth installing. This list should help cut down that uncertainty by giving you a breakdown of why these 14 outstanding options are so popular.

After learning to use one of them, you might decide to share your findings with other friends who have WordPress sites with photos.

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ED: This has always been one of our most popular posts, and now thanks to Kayla it is completely overhauled and updated!

Charlie has been building WordPress themes, reviewing web hosts and utilizing social media since their respective inceptions.

136 thoughts on “14 Best Photo Gallery Plugins for WordPress

  1. Sriram says:

    Hi Charlie,

    Thanks for the list of gallery plugins. Can you tell me which of these plugins is most profitable in the long run, considering the plugin is lightweight and doesn’t affect the site speed?

  2. katie says:

    I always use NextGEN Gallery and im highly recommending it to you. try

  3. Jonathan Camp says:

    photomosaic will not work on wordpress v5.x and above. I have created a fix for this if anyone is interested – just contact me (it’s free) – this is not spam.

  4. Karan Pandey says:

    Thanks for sharing such a best plugins for photo gallery.

  5. Nice article. But you did not mention Meow Gallery. It is a simple WordPress gallery plugin that works natively inside the WordPress block editor.

  6. Joy Dhar says:

    Hi Kayla,

    Thanks for the list of Photo gallery Plugins.

    Can you suggest which one would be profitable in the long run? based on budget and service!

  7. Naina Singh says:

    Thanks for sharing this amazing guide for the best WordPress gallery plugins. Can you cover and explain a bit about some of the best plugins for the slider for images in a blog post on the WordPress website?

  8. Abhinandan says:

    Thanks for the superb list of gallery plugins.

    We use nextgen gallery most of the time. but after reading your reviews we will also try Gallery Bank.

  9. Spencer says:

    Feed Them Gallery is great too, and the paid version lets you drag images into a gallery and converts them into WooCommerce products. https://wordpress.org/plugins/feed-them-gallery/

  10. Simon says:

    Just want to share..

    I have used this wordpress plugin called “Innozilla Image Gallery 8” and its really simple to use and very lightweight. 😀

  11. Linda says:

    Any suggestions for the best gallery for user’s submitting their own photos/layouts using our products? Each user would have their own ID/PW and create their own album. Our old websites used Coppermine Gallery and Photo Sharing Gallery by PhotoPost, but those are not being updated anymore.

    1. charles Charles says:

      Hi Linda, have you looked at User Post Gallery?

  12. Iftekhar says:

    WOW! nice collection of plugins! I have used many of these. I also want to mention http://wordpress.org/plugins/awesome-responsive-photo-gallery this gallery plugin which is also very nice. It has 3 different popular lightbox scripts with a wide range of customizable options. You can check it too.

  13. Ruperth Simth says:

    Hi Guys
    I was searching for the best gallery plugins. Your article helped me. It’s a clean and clear article. Keep updating posts like this.

  14. Prabhu says:

    Hi
    Thanks for the post. It is really a great information and effective for the beginners. All these plugin setups are quite simple. Can you tell me among the listed plugins which plugin seems to be the best?

    1. charles Charles says:

      Hi Prabhu, I’ve become a big fan of Envira, but they all have their pros and cons. I think the best one really depends on the specific requirements of a particular project.

  15. abdullah says:

    Hi,
    There is a free plugin you can use for nextgen gallery image searching. its simple and works fine. it gives search box by shortcode and returns list of matched images with a lightbox image popup slider.

    https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-nextgen-gallery-search/

    It has a pro version too with more features.

    you guys can have a look.

  16. Ray Boller says:

    Thanks for awesome list!

  17. Jeremy Holden says:

    The thumbnail gallery is exactly what I’m looking for. I just don’t like that there is no support and it hasn’t been updated in over 3 years.

    Is there anything else that has the same style of filmstrip style gallery?

    1. charles Charles says:

      Hi Jeremy, have you looked at Shareprints?

  18. Danial Wilson says:

    Thanks for sharing such an amazing list.

  19. chuyen nghiep says:

    I’d love to see a WordPress plugin that brings in Flickr photos as native WordPress posts.

  20. Rich says:

    Does anyone have a recommendation for a plugin that does nested albums? We have our images on Amazon S3 so it would need to play nice with that. Essentially if we cover an event say comic con we want albums with the main comic con album broken down by artists, cosplay etc. I tried Envira and unfortunately, it did not meet my needs.

    1. charles Charles says:

      Hi Rich, I’m not aware of a gallery plugin with that functionality off the top of my head. My immediate thought is why not arrange your coverage of an event as a category, and then have different galleries as separate posts in that category…but I guess you’ve already considered that.

  21. Kami says:

    Hi!
    if there is a plug that allows you to create a gallery where each picture has a different url?

    1. charles Charles says:

      Hi Kami, Have you taken a look at some of the great photography themes out there? There are lots of free and premium photography themes which might suit your needs.

      I suggest looking at these because they have great post formats for photos so you can upload each photo as a post (with an individual permalink URL), and in many cases they have category templates which can act as galleries.

  22. aburi says:

    If you are looking for a simple, but flexible lightbox gallery with support of videos, I can recommend you Pronto Gallery.

  23. karen says:

    I’m just starting to learn WordPress in order to create a website to showcase 2,000+ photos and videos aimed at international film location managers. The images are in a variety of aspect ratios, which must be retained.

    I’m seeking a program that will a) not change the aspect ratio and b) offer a simple interface that will allow a user to hover/click on a “main image” to reveal its sub-images.

    There seem to be so many products out there and I am totally confused.

    Upfront? Envira? Justified Image? Photo Gallery? Awesome Gallery?

    Help.

    1. charles Charles says:

      Hi Karen, I would be inclined to use either Envira or Nextgen, both are very capable plugins. In terms of the UI, I think what you describe is basically a series of galleries which are accessed from a single index page, yes? This shouldn’t be hard to achieve with either of these plugins.

  24. harsh says:

    i am having a galley in wp where i have 500 images and i want to keep a next page and per page 30 image than how should i do ??

    1. charles Charles says:

      Hi Harsh, good question. I know that Envira has pagination functionality for their galleries so that would be a good option.

  25. Louis says:

    I am currently using the gallery bank plugin for my businesses website. Do you know if it’s possible to caption my pictures on the free version? Or do I need to upgrade? Cheers.

    1. charles Charles says:

      Hi Louis, I’ve not tried Gallery Bank, but it seems you need to upgrade to get the full set of features.

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