As a WordPress user, showcasing your photos, artwork, or designs in an attractive and eye-catching manner is crucial for making your portfolio or blog stand out. That’s where gallery plugins come in – they offer a range of features to help you display your media in an engaging and visually appealing way.
But with so many options available, it can be challenging to know where to start. That’s why we’ve compiled a list of the 10 best WordPress gallery plugins for portfolio blogs and websites. These plugins are packed with features, from customizable layouts and styling options to integration with social media and e-commerce platforms. Whether you’re a photographer, artist, or designer, you’ll find the perfect plugin to suit your needs.
Originally Published Feb 1st 2019, updated Feb 02 2023
1. MetaSlider
Total downloads: 700,000+
Five Star Ratings: 660+
The most popular, fully responsive and SEO-friendly WordPress slider plugin.
Features:
- Simple, easy to use interface – perfect for individual users, developers & clients!
- Create Responsive, SEO-optimized slideshows in seconds
- Unrestricted support for Image slides (supports caption, link, title text, alt text)
- Full width slideshow support
- Drag and drop slide reordering
- Admin preview
- Intelligent image cropping
- Set image crop position
- Built in Widget and Shortcode
- Loads of slideshow configuration options – transition effect, speed etc (per slideshow)
- Fully localized
- WordPress Multi Site compatible
- Compatible with translation plugins (WPML, PolyLang & qTranslate)
- Extensive Developer API (hooks & filters)
- Fast – only the minimum JavaScript/CSS is included on your page
- Free basic support (covering installation issues and theme/plugin conflicts)
- Lightbox support
2. NextGEN Gallery
Total downloads: 600,000+
Five Star Ratings: 4,000+
This is a gallery plugin that has been popular for many years.
The plugin offers a complete WordPress gallery management system with the ability to batch upload photos, import meta data, add/delete/rearrange/sort photos, edit thumbnails, group galleries into albums, and more.
3. Photo Gallery by 10Web
Total downloads: 200,000+
Five Star Ratings: 1,400+
The Photo Gallery by 10Web is a WordPress plugin for creating responsive, full-featured photo galleries on your WordPress websites.
Main features:
- 100% Responsive
- Multiple gallery views to choose from: Thumbnails, Image Browser, Slide show for galleries and Compact Album, Extended Album views for albums
- Supports the following types of image files: JPG, JPEG, PNG and GIF
- Unlimited quantity of photos in gallery
- Possibility of adding unlimited quantity of galleries/albums
- Detailed three-column visual shortcode for adding created gallery/galleries and album/albums into the posts and pages.
- Detailed (Extended) album and compact album view
- Chances to provide details for images (tags, captions)
- Thumbnail editing tools (Crop, rotate and flip)
- Possibility of changing the amount of images displayed in a single row of an album/gallery
- Slideshow view with auto play and shuffle features
- Audio track playback possibility with the image slideshow
- Possibility of adding Watermarks/Advertisements for each individual image
- Direct Image download and original image display capabilities
- WordPress Tag cloud hosted widget
- Photo Gallery Slideshow widget
- Photo Gallery Widget for displaying albums and galleries as widgets
- Separate shortcode generator page for the websites using custom pages/custom editors.
- Possibility to enable and disable pagination for albums, Thumbnails view, blog Style View.
- Support for YouTube and Vimeo videos within Galleries.
- Possibility to add videos via YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram, Facebook, Flickr or Dailymotion URL.
- Possibility of uploading images from the Media Library of the website.
- Possibility to add tags (captions) to all images at once.
- Right-click disabling option for the image downloads protection.
- Possibility to display images in the albums in thumbnail or masonry view upon opening
- WordPress Search Integration by gallery and album title
- Possibility to display the number of the images in the gallery lightbox (optional feature)
- Resizing possibility after adding the pictures
- Possibility to display Search Box on the gallery page for the search based on titles
- Possibility to display the number of images in the lightbox
- Enable full width feature for the lightbox.
- Possibility to add next/previous and play/pause buttons in carousel
- Possibility to enable/disable autoplay for gallery carousel
- Redirection option upon clicking picture thumbnail
- Front-end image sorting possibility (dropdown) for the users
4. Responsive Lightbox & Gallery
Total downloads: 200,000+
Five Star Ratings: 1,800+
This plugin allows users to create galleries and view larger versions of images, galleries, and videos in a lightbox (overlay) effect optimized for mobile devices.
Main features:
- Select from 5 responsive lightbox scripts (SwipeBox, prettyPhoto, FancyBox, Nivo Lightbox, Image Lightbox)
- Automatically add lightbox to WordPress image galleries
- Automatically add lightbox to WordPress image links
- Automatically add lightbox to WordPress video links (YouTube, Vimeo)
- Option to display single post images as a gallery
- Option to modify native WP gallery links image size
- Option to set gallery images title from image title, caption, alt or description
- Option to force lightbox for custom WP gallery replacements like Jetpack tiled galleries
- Option to trigger lightbox on custom jquery events
- Enter a selector for lightbox
- Highly customizable settings for each of the lightbox scripts
- Multisite support
- Filter hook for embeddding different scripts based on any custom conditions (page, post, category, user id, etc.)
- .pot file for translations included
5. FooGallery
Total downloads: 200,000+
Five Star Ratings: 800+
FooGallery is a responsive, retina-ready, blazing fast and highly customizable gallery plugin for WordPress.
Key Features:
- Lazy loading
- Simple Pagination (dots)
- Live previews in admin
- Retina thumbnail support
- Gallery Widget
- Albums built-in! (Activate the albums extension)
- Use built-in media library to manage images
- Drag n Drop reordering of images and galleries
- Beautiful gallery templates
- Custom CSS for both galleries and albums
- Copy to clipboard shortcodes
- Visual shortcodes in rich text editor
- Gallery picker to insert shortcodes
- Page usage meta box with one-click gallery page creation
- NextGen importer tool (albums and galleries and shortcodes)
- Multisite Support
- PHP 7 compatible
- plus many, many more
6. Envira Gallery
Total downloads: 100,000+
Five Star Ratings: 1,400+
This gallery plugin is an excellent starting point. The Envira Gallery plugin will extend all of the basic capabilities of WordPress galleries. There are options down the right side of this plugin and a number of columns that let you define the various size of thumbnails and images for display at different resolutions. This ensures that you don’t have to upload many different images and tag them. Instead the image will automatically scale to the uniform size that you would like.
Main features:
- Drag & Drop Photo Gallery Builder
- 100% Responsive Photo Gallery – Mobile Friendly
- Beautiful Photo Gallery Templates for Customization
- Albums – Easily organize your photo galleries, choose cover photos, and more.
- Social Sharing – Share your photos on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+
- Video Galleries – Not just for photos! You can add YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia, and other videos in your video gallery.
- Watermarking – Protect your images from theft with watermarking.
- Slideshow – Add beautiful slideshow with autoplay, manual controls, and more.
- Deep linking – Make your gallery SEO friendly and easily link to individual images with deeplinking.
- Pagination – Split your large galleries into multiple pages to improve page speed, user experience, and pageviews.
- Image Proofing – We made client image proofing easy for your photography business.
- WooCommerce Integration – Instantly display and sell your photos with the most popular eCommerce software on the web.
- Image Tags – Organize your WordPress photos with tags for easy search and display. You can use this to create a filterable gallery.
- Password Protection – Prevent unauthorized access to your WordPress galleries.
- Standalone Galleries – Create independent galleries that are not tied to your posts or pages.
- EXIF Meta Data – Display your EXIF data including camera model, aperture, shutter speed, and more.
- Pinterest – Add the Pinterest Pin It button to your gallery images to improve your reach.
- Instagram Galleries – Import Instagram images into your WordPress gallery.
- FullScreen Display – Take advantage of the native fullscreen gallery and lightbox display.
- Supersized Images – Don’t want to crop or resize your images? Supersize allows you to do just that.
- Dynamic Galleries – Easily create galleries on the fly from various different sources.
- Gallery Defaults – Speed up the gallery creation process by saving your default settings.
- CSS Styles – Customize your gallery by adding custom CSS and styles.
- Adobe Lightroom to WordPress – Do you love Adobe Lightroom? We do too. You can automatically create and sync photo galleries from your Adobe Lightroom Collections. We made Lightroom to WordPress import easy!
- Zip Importer – Nobody likes uploading images individually. Now you can build a gallery from a .zip file.
- Dropbox Importer – Do you love Dropbox? We do too. You can easily import photos from your Dropbox account into your WordPress Gallery.
- NextGen Importer – Not a fan of NextGen Gallery? Want to switch from NextGen Gallery? You can do that in few simple clicks.
- Want us to add something else? Suggest a feature and we’ll get it added!
7. Modula Image Gallery
Total downloads: 100,000+
Five Star Ratings: 490+
The Modula WordPress gallery plugin lets you adding custom, unique and responsive galleries to your website.
Main features:
- Modula Filters
- Custom Grid
- 12 Hover Effects
- 6 Lightbox Styles
- Simple to embed using a shortcode
8. Social Feed Gallery
Total downloads: 80,000+
Five Star Ratings: 170+
Instagram Feed Gallery is the most user-friendly Instagram plugin for WordPress . It was built to simplify the integration, to reduce time to have sites updated and to be on track with social media that shows best growing indicators.
9. Visual Portfolio, Photo Gallery & Posts Grid
Total downloads: 60,000+
Five Star Ratings: 220+
A Visual Portfolio, Photo Gallery & Posts Grid WordPress plugin, to help every creative, agency, or photographers get access to the powerful tools they need to showcase their beautiful works and attract more love from their potential and existing customers.
10. Photo Gallery, Images, Slider in Rbs Image Gallery
Total downloads: 50,000+
Five Star Ratings: 300+
A fast, easy gallery plugin with a simple and very beautiful, highly customizable design. With this plugin, even newbies in WordPress will be able to create their first gallery in a few minutes and at the same time WordPress professionals get advanced tools and freedom of creativity.
Features:
- No Right click / Content protection – in Robo gallery possible to disable right click to prevent copying of the gallery content. Content copy protection is very important for every photographer’s portfolio photos.
- Lightbox no right-click / Content protection – in Robo gallery possible to disable right-click to prevent copying of the gallery lightbox content. Content copy protection is very important for every photographer’s portfolio photos.
- One click setup – implemented one-click wizard with the 5 types: image grid, mosaic, masonry, polaroid, and youtube gallery.
- No limits – no limits for the number of instances with 5 free types: photo grid, mosaic, masonry, polaroid, and youtube grid.
- No limits for images/photos – no limits for the number of images/photos in every album.
- Gutenberg block – implemented Gutenberg gallery block for simple and fast configuration of the plugin in Gutenberg editor.
- Fully responsive and Mobile features – plugin implemented with advanced settings for different devices’ screen sizes.
- Fade effects – one of the hover animations it’s a classic fade effect.
- Batch images upload – advanced media manager which allows uploading batch of images with one click. Just drag and drop a set of the gallery images and it’s uploaded automatically to the server.
- Auto-resizing for thumbnails and images – media manager allow you to make additional customization of the images, rotary, flip, crop, and manually resize.
- Customizable 15 hover effects – all hover effects work in cooperation with interface configuration options. You can easily change the style and colors of the hover animation elements.
- Implemented to avoid AJAX libs conflicts – code implemented in native WordPress style as a result our plugin doesn’t have any conflicts and works really stable.
- Polaroid gallery – with our plugin you can create a Polaroid layout just with a few clicks.
- Advanced Polaroid Styles – Polaroid styles are implemented with advanced functionality. Implemented left, right and center image titles alignment. Polaroid description panel of the image’s background color selector.
- Build in colors selector – you can easily change the color of any interface element.
- Social sharing – gallery lightbox supports social sharing on Twitter, Facebook, google plus and Pinterest.
- Build in borders and shadows settings – borders and shadows have advanced options for configuration design and style of this gallery interface elements.
- Font settings – build in advanced text style editor options. With these options, you can fully customize the title, caption, and description of every image
- Different resolutions – implemented advanced size control options where you can define layout or fixed size for the interface elements on different screen resolutions
- Implemented in native WordPress style using native classes – native for WordPress implemented without any hacks and tricks
- Multi Categories – multi categories albums support. You can create your own galleries tree, depending on your needs
- Classic layout – layout could have a classic style or grid layout, and every item on the page could have its own styles and settings
- Advanced pagination function – pagination function implemented in google load more style
- Work in IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome – work properly in all the latest versions of the popular browsers
- Lazy loading option – implemented advanced lazy loading options, for the case when you have big sets of images you can define the amount of the galleries images for the first load and for the next steps of the load more options
- Advanced cache options – implemented advanced images caching options
- Overlay effects – all hover effects of the thumbnails are highly customizable and have a full set of options
- Backend text settings preview – all images titles, captions, and descriptions are highly customizable also we have a life preview of the changes in the backend
- Resizing crop function – in media managed you’ll find a great set of very useful features for example images crop, and manual resizing
- Optional mobile touch support – our plugin supports mobile devices and you can customize responsive gallery layout settings for different screen sizes
- Custom ordering of the images – ordering for all images could be easily changed manually in the media manager or you can find order by options in general settings
- Ability to insert plugin to the WordPress post, page, widget – every item could be inserted in to post, page or widget with a build shortcode tag or using a wizard button – shortcode generator in post or page editor
- Lightbox social buttons – in plugin settings you can turn on/off social buttons
- Lightbox background color – in lightbox settings you can change the color of the background with a comfortable color selector
- Lightbox background transparency – in lightbox settings you can change the transparency of the background with a comfortable color selector
- Lightbox font color – in lightbox settings you can change the color of the font with a comfortable color selector
- Lightbox font transparency – in lightbox settings you can change the transparency of the font with a comfortable color selector
- Advanced Compatibility – implement advanced compatibility options to avoid conflict with libraries of other plugins and themes. You can switch between modes to find the proper value for your case.
- Advanced Social Sharing – advanced social sharing functionality in a lightbox. Implemented deep linking functionality for the images social sharing services Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, VK
- Click Thumbnails – advanced click functionality. You can use click-on buttons or on the gallery thumbnails to enlarge images or open the image link. With the new functionality, you can combine absolutely different features of the clicking functionality.
- Alignment – alignment of the photo gallery in the post or page depends on your needs. You don’t need to use HTML tags or some CSS tricks this function gonna help you to align your image gallery the way you need. Possible to select one from implemented alignment modes: left, right, and center for image alignment inside post or page content.
- Padding – new padding options. Define custom values in pixels for padding thumbnails block in post or page content. Is it possible to define padding from the left, right, top and bottom side
- Post Generator – new function for the automatic post creation with a gallery tag inside it. Advanced post manager implemented with additional functions for customization and management of all your posts in one place.
- Description Panel – new image description panel in a lightbox with a few different themes. The settings section makes you able to change content panel theme styles. In the description panel, you can define a few content sources. Image title, image caption or image description.
- Swipe in Lightbox – lightbox supports the swipe effect on multiple mobile devices. Swipe properly work in the lightbox for all images. Tested for Android and iOS.
- Advanced Link Button Design – front end interface have link button. This button provides linking functionality on every thumbnail.
This interface button has a wide range of front-end interface customization options. You can easily change this button color, border and icon. - Hover Description Template – every image contain description field. In additional parameters of the image hover, you can define some HTML tags or build-in tags for customization of the image description.
- Plugin Compatibility Settings – in plugin settings you can customize general plugin settings to avoid conflicts with other plugins or WordPress themes.
- Admin Interface Modes – in plugin settings you can customize plugin interface settings to avoid conflicts with another plugin.
- Video Links – in the media manager every image have a separate option for a video link. Video links could be specified to the youtube feed or Vimeo.
- Images Custom Ratio – in plugin settings you can define a custom ratio for every picture. Every gallery could have personal settings for this option.
- Thumbnails Fade Effect – implemented Fade effect for the hover of the photo thumbnails. With such a hover animation effect become more attractive and eye-catching.
- Advanced Load more function – implemented very attractive navigation mode. Auto pre-loading images like an endless list of images. Load more functions have a lot of customization options to make it work the way you need.
- SEO code optimization – implemented a few front-end code output modes. One simplified mode with all core front-end code elements and another mode with additional not visible elements. This option has additional modes. These SEO output modes give you default output mode, thumbnail, and thumbnail+links mode.
- Template – in our plugin, we have an advanced template engine for images description. Every hover text of the image could be edited and customized with built-in template options.
- Cache – incredible new super cache option makes your page load ten times faster. This function use absolutely new model of the image load. When you enable cache for big-size galleries it’s gonna be much faster and more effective to use our plugin. Your visitors will be really surprised by the speed of the page load.
- Support Videos – every image has an option where possible to define a video link for every particular picture.
- Elementor Block – in the Elementor page builder you can use the built-in Elementor block in our plugin.
- Slider – possible to create an image slider with mobile-friendly interface and support touchscreen devices. In slideshow mode, you can upload photos to the image slideshow and configure different interface elements to navigate between slides. Possible to create an unlimited amount of photo sliders with different text on the description panel. You can use a title, caption or photo description as a text source for every slide of the image slider.
Conclusion:
Each of these gallery plugins would represent a huge upgrade for your WordPress website. If you would like to improve your gallery today, you should strongly consider downloading and installing any of these great solutions.
