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
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
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 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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Gallery Bank
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
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 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
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
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!
136 thoughts on “14 Best Photo Gallery Plugins for WordPress”
Hello, I’m having a website on fashion and I want a better gallery look. Currently, I’m using wp photo gallery and I want to change plugin because that plugin doesn’t have many designs. So can anyone help me in choosing the better plugin from the list? Thanks for sharing the list.
Hi Rajan, for what you describe I’d probably go with Envira, but you might also checkout a new one I’ve just become aware of, Lemon Grid, it looks like a great option too.
Really great photo gallery plugin list.Thanks for sharing that information.
I’m looking for a new on-line gallery system and will checkout your recommendations.
Thanks for the info.
Hugh
Charles, it seems that WP Photo Album Plus will do what i want. https://wordpress.org/support/topic/user-gallery?replies=78
Installing and testing it now and will let you know. From first glance, there are a TON of settings. Not sure how well it will work yet, but the options seem endless.
Hi David, thanks for the followup WP Photo Album Plus is definitely feature rich, but I wasn’t actually aware it could handle albums per user, nice! I’ll be really interested to know how you get on with this project. It’s not a scenario I’ve thought of before, but given this possibility it’s not hard to imagine lots of use cases.
Getting close to being finished:
+ Incredible support. I don’t think better support is possible.
+ Versatile
+ CSS classes and easy to find with Chrome inspector. Seems not much is hidden.
– Complex
– Developer is clearly a great coder, but surely lacks design skills as the layout needs a lot css work.
This site/thread is a great exchange of ideas and information.
Hope you can help me.
I am developing a social networking site that will have a lot of users (hopefully) and I am looking for a plugin that will allow each of my users to be able to create their own library and add photos to that library. Similar to the Facebook model.
Any suggestions?
Thank you!!!
Hi David, are you are planning to use https://buddypress.org/ to power your social network? I’m not a BuddyPress expert myself, but it would be to be the obvious choice if you are starting a social network with WordPress. There are many 3rd party BuddyPress plugins and I feel sure you could find something that would support your use case there.
Thanks Charles, I guess I should have added that detail.
Yes, I am using WordPress, with Ultimate Member instead of Buddypress. But, basically both are similar, but the UM has out of the box the features I wanted.
I looked many times at the gallery plugins, but none indicated the ability to allow each registered user of the site to have the ability to create their own library.
I was thinking that Nextgen would do this, but playing with the setup, it too seems to only support the galleries for the owner of the site. This is where I am stuck.
Great list, thanks a lot! I’m a photographer from Germany and I’m using some of the listed plugins, too 🙂
But I think there is one brilliant WP-plugin missing.
One year ago I needed a plugin for my WP-portfolio to organize my clients and provide their photos in a secure way. I found the plugin “Photograhy Management”. It is exactly what I was looking for. I’m so glad I found it and my clients love it, too.: https://wordpress.org/plugins/photography-management/
Hi Kim, that looks like a great client work management solution for professional photographers.
Hi! I’ve just wanted to get some info or recommendations about Focuson Parallax Responsive Gallery.
Has anyone got experience with this plugin? Is it worth the shot?
Hi Raf, I’ve not used this one myself so I can’t comment. The demo certainly looks interesting.
Love this post, I’ve learned so much but still don’t see what I need. Site I’m currently building needs the ability for visitors of the site to be able to load their own images. Client wants also wants ability to review their images before she tags and categorizes them appropriately. Any ideas?
Hi Karen, yeah these plugins are all about displaying images on your site rather than managing user submissions. Have you looked at Frontend Loader.
I want a plugin that will help nesting and backing the Thumbnail Gallery . anyone who knows would help me please. I will appreciate so much
Hi David, can you elaborate a little more on your requirements. I’m not sure what you mean by “nesting and backing the Thumbnail Gallery”.
Thank you for the comprehensive review of the various galleries. My client list varies, from sculptors to learning centers to authors, and each is very unique in what they want for a gallery. Your list helped immensely, and we’ve chosen SharePrints for it’s diverse options. Thank you again, SP
Suzanne – I’m very interested in SharePrints – but a little hesitant due to the lack of developer response to inquiries – a quite a few negative posts on their FB page. Can you provide some links to sites using SharePrints for me to visit? I need some encouragement to go with them . . .
Very nice overview of the available software. I am the author of Simplest Gallery so I was definitely happy to see it reviewed here.
Seems I always have to buy the paid version to figure out whether it can do what I need, and I waste money.
I need a plugin that will show a single preview image, around which text can wrap like a regular JPG, then only when clicked does the single image open to a lightbox or image viewer.
I can’t see whether this is possible for anything until I install it, configure it, plow through all the settings, then MAYBE guess as to whether the paid version will work, and wait 24-48 hours for response to a pre-sales question. Meanwhile, client is waiting…… waiting….
Hi Carol, have you tried Simple Lightbox? It’s free and based on the description of what you want I think it will meet your needs.
Looking for a photo plugin that handles comments nicely. Also – I’d really like to be able to allow tagging on the photos to help identify individuals or objects. Anyone have a suggestion?
Hi Del, I’d try Envira Gallery.
Hi all,
I came across this post doing a little research on people linking to our plugins (FooBox listed above) and wanted to chime in to make a small correction and also invite you to try our free gallery plugin named FooGallery.
FooBox is listed as a gallery plugin above, but it’s actually not a gallery plugin, it’s a responsive lightbox plugin that works with several galleries including WP galleries, NextGen, Envira, Justified Image Grid, etc.
FooBox has been around for more than three years and we still actively develop and support it, but I also wanted you to know that we developed FooGallery as free plugin (found on the .org repo and also here: http://foo.gallery/ )
FooBox works with FooGallery of course and FooGallery was built to be extensible by developers so there are several extensions to choose from if you need them.
I hope you all will take some time to check out FooGallery and see how it works for you. Our goal was to build it with tight integration into the Media Library and to keep it light and fast while still providing some great built-in features.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/foogallery/
I am looking for a wp gallery plugin for this model, she wants to charge for downloads of her images….. any suggestions?
Hi Kymberley, I would go with Nextgen Pro. It has great photo commerce features.
Hi,
I hope somebody could help me. I’m using NGG but I’m tired about his performance and I have decided to change. I have two questions
1. which gallery plugin is the best performant?
2. Which is the easiest for migrating from NGG?
If somebody could help I will be very grateful.
Regards,
Fernando
Hi Fernando, I think Envira Gallery is your best option. Envira is fast and they have a free NGG importer addon which I havn’t used, but I understand does a good job.
i have been looking for an image gallery for my blog picture gallery
i got the solution from that problem in your blog
thanks a lot for this
Hello, I love this blog post. I’ve read each one and have looked into each one but haven’t worked with them as much as you have. I currently have a site I designed for a client but it is so slow because it loads all the images at once that it makes the experience miserable. I’m using currently GoPortfolio.
All I need is a gallery that displays all the images with infinite scroll not to bog down load time, a filter to sort each category of photos, and a Lightbox.
It just needs to be simple as possible, tiled gallery or masonry gallery (preferred)… Any recommendations?
Hi Alex, I’m a big fan of Shareprints. It is very simple to use and offers a range of gallery styles including the masonry layout. I’d give that a go.
That is exactly what I am looking for as well.
Just want to be able to filter my gallery based on different tags.
Can’t seem to find a good reliable plugin that can do that simply.
Hi Nabeel, I’m not sure I understand the use case exactly. Do you mean you want to be able to tag images in your media library so that visitors can filter a gallery by tag? Or you want to be able to create different galleries around different keyword tags?
Alex, did you ever find what you were looking for? I’m looking for pretty much the same thing, with the addition of being able to turn off image titles/captions/descriptions, etc…, and it’s giving me an ulcer….
thanks for sharing i need photo gallery plugin for my site. your article is very helpful for me or all new members of wordpress.
I would like to add one more, it’s really new but fully integrated with the WordPress media section…check it out! Zero Gallery
Thanks for the interesting review. I have tried some different gallery plugins, and stopped on Gmedia Gallery so far. It’s powerful yet user-friendly. You can show image galleries, photo slideshows, play music and videos. 14 modules will help you customize media content the way you like. Responsive on all devices. And it’s FREE. https://wordpress.org/plugins/grand-media/
I would like to suggest the “Unite Gallery”.
It has 9 gallery types, responsive play youtube, video and images, and has a lot of customizing features.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/unite-gallery-lite/
You can browse it’s demo here.
Thank you for the suggestions on WordPress photo gallery plugins!
It was a helpful article.
Anyone know of an easy gallery plugin where you can download different sizes of the photo? (e.g. 1 low-res and 1 high-res image)
I think i’ll have to add some php to lightbox where a 1st link downloads the thumbnail and a 2nd link downloads the full size image
Not sure how though.
I need the same thing.
Hi Kiki, this isn’t a baked feature I’ve seen in any gallery plugin. WordPress will generate different sizes on upload, so it is totally doable, either by manually adding links to the display captions or could be coded to display dyanmically. Though in the latter case you are going to need to get a developer to help. If that is an option you’d consider then I would try Codeable.
I am searching for wordpress multi category gallery. which of this galleries is multi category?
Hi Ahmad, what do you mean by multi-category gallery? I’m not sure what this means in terms of how the gallery is displayed.
Looking for a Image/Content Slider that resembles the link below. Anyone have any suggestions? Thank you!
http://www.harpersbazaar.com/fashion/fashion-week/new-york-fashion-week-spring-2015#slide-4
So far, no complaints, as a matter of fact- very glad to have found this plugin (shareprint) as it’s built on bootstrap, so very responsive friendly. Love the sharing functionality and ux.
Try Mosaic gallery as well, I think it’s on themeForest. I am still searching for the best one though…
Shareprints update is now a year behind almost and they keep promising an update. There are some main common sense things this plugin cannot do and that effect what would otherwise be possible the best gallery plugin.
I think Shareprints is close to being the best gallery plugin I’ve tried. The visual shortcodes are great and once used, make everything else seem clunky.
It is fast and easy to use but…
Shareprints does not have good handling of image captions. Only 1 of the 7 gallery types supports captions (Blog). And the lightbox does not show image captions by default. And when you turn click to show captions/descriptions, the image in the lightbox gets tiny. On mobile, you cannot show the image and caption at the same time.
Also, the developers have not responded to support requests for the past month. I sent half a dozen requests via their support form or directly via email and nothing but silence. I am concerned that something is wrong with their company or they are going out of business.
Hi Deva, thanks for your comment. I’ve reached out to the developer myself and pointed him to this comment. I hope you hear back soon.
Hi Charles,
Thanks for your effort. I never heard back from the Shareprints Devs.
I consider the Shareprints plugin no longer developed and have stopped using it on my own site and the sites I maintain for others.
It’s a shame as it has much promise.
Hi,
Thanks for the article. Do any of the wordpress galleries support migrating/converting from Photopost?
Hi Phroso, I’m not aware of any that do support this.