The 6 Best Gallery Plugins for WordPress

Posted on July 31st, 2021

People always use different types of images and galleries to attract visitors, and these galleries also look good on our website. WordPress plugin’s library has many plugins that are very helpful and it has some easiest ways to display a great-looking gallery on your WordPress website.

In addition, you’ll find hundreds of famous and well-rated gallery plugins at WordPress.org and other marketplaces. But with so many options to choose from, it can be hard to find a plugin which provides a right combination of features, aesthetics and ease of use.

Before we dive in, let’s discuss some essential criteria about an ideal Gallery Plugin. In other words, how to choose the best Photo Gallery Plugin. Because we have too many WordPress Gallery plugins to choose from, you can also find some of the best plugins on CodeCanyon, or you may search on google for it. But, wherever you go, you’ll see a long list of the related plugins, without much guidance on which is the best for our website.

So, here we will discuss some best and mandatory feature lists for the best and ideal plugin. Of course, there are different requirements for the various uses, but we still tried to pick out the essential features.

  • The plugin must have support for LightBox; Viewers love to see photos on a large scale window. The lightbox will help them to see pictures without leaving the site.
  • It must have video tools that will help you to embed YouTube and Vimeo videos. 
  • Social sharing is a mandatory feature, and this feature helps you share your post and articles with people. So, it must have support for social media sharing like Facebook, Instagram and email.
  • The plugin must have a comments feature, and this feature helps you engage the visitors to your website. We can create a community and discussion behind the image or post.
  • It should also some different layouts like tiled, mosaic and masonry. It will help you adjust the gallery on the page, and options must be required for the various websites.
  • Ecommerce support is also a priority feature, and it will help you sell your photos through a WordPress website.
  • The plugin must have Image Protection for those people who don’t want their images used without permission.
  • A gallery with a digital download management system will help you compile the images. It will also help you to divide the image into categories.
  • The fully responsive template and layouts will help us display the image gallery perfectly on every device, Like iPhone, Android, desktop, and iPads.
  • The animations and other effects grab visitors’ attention and attractions. They love the different types of effects to the lightbox, like fade in and slide in.
  • Some websites’ basic need is minimum loading time so that the High-Quality Images will take more loading time. We need a plugin that can optimize the images and also have the support of lazy loading.
  • The Customization tools like changing Colours, Font and size will help you create a perfect gallery that will match your website.
  • The gallery plugin also requires a drag and drop builder, which will help to organize the images and videos.  
  • It also requires linking options that will help your visitor to redirect to actual posts or pages. It can be a product Gallery for an e-commerce website, and we must want a plugin that we can use on all types of websites.

There are so many features which can be a great option to have. But, at the starting point, these requirements lists will help you identify the right plugin for your website. Then, of course, it depends on your requirements; some companies ask for a better plugin for image protection because they value copyrights protection while others don’t require that feature. So, Let’s start the article with the list of plugins. Then, we will discuss every plugin one by one briefly, with features and pricing.

  1. FooGallery
  2. NextGEN Gallery
  3. Modula
  4. Envira Gallery
  5. Photo Gallery by 10Web
  6. Portfolio Gallery

1. FooGallery

Best Image Gallery & Responsive Photo Gallery – FooGallery

The FooGallery plugin is a free plugin that will help us create different Image Galleries, and we can display them on our website with various layouts. This plugin introduced by Foo Plugins, is a simple image Gallery plugin that provides some valuable tools. All the Galleries provided by this plugin will be ready to use directly on your website.

The free version also has album support built-in, which means we can easily group them in multiple galleries. In addition, some gallery templates are available which are ready to use. These templates will help you to create a Gallery quickly.

Honestly, this plugin is one of the easiest ways to create an attractive gallery for the website. The free version of this plugin also provides some excellent features like Hover Effects on photos or media files. This plugin allows you to display the images on a large scale window pop up box called a lightbox.

The plugin automatically takes the media files titles and captions. You can also provide some pagination effects in case you have too many photos. One of the most beneficial critical features of this plugin is, it gives an infinite scroll effect which helps us to engage the visitors.

The FooGallery plugin also has support for videos in galleries. Then like we talked about earlier on feature requirements of the plugin, this plugin also supported the Lazy Loading. It is a capable plugin that can optimize an image’s performance.

It provides some gallery templates with different loading effects. In short, this is a simple Image Gallery plugin for a WordPress website. Let’s see the feature list of this plugin in brief.

Feature List

  • You will have many gallery templates options with free versions too. In case you require more options with different layouts and designs, you can buy a premium version.
  • It provides a live preview at the admin area, and it will help you simulate the Look and Feel of the Galleries. How does it look on your website after publishing the gallery? You can see it with the live preview.
  •  The plugin allows you to give some hover effect on the Galley. It also supports animations on loading, and it will help us attract visitors and new users.
  • Some of the combinations of critical features like LazyLoading and Infinite scrolls will be beneficial for your website. It’s a surety that the gallery’s images will not load at the same time when the website loads on the client’s browser. The LazyLoad feature will help us to take time and load the site first on a client’s browser. And infinite scroll will allow us to display unlimited images on the Gallery plugin.
  • The gallery filtering options are available, but we need more extensive collections of media files. These features will be helpful for those who have portfolio websites and those who want searching easier.
  • This plugin also provides a drag and drop interface that will help you to organize the media files in the backend website like WordPress Media Library.
  • Galleries that are created with this plugin also provide Shortcodes to display the galleries on the website. But it also allows you to add those galleries with a drag and drop interface provided by Gutenberg support.
  • This plugin also allows you to use tons of developer options like a boilerplate extension. 
  • You will receive beautiful combinations of standard and unique gallery templates, with options like justified, single thumbnail and masonry galleries.
  • These galleries are so flexible that they can be displayed anywhere on the website. You can use the widget area, On the footer or the slider to display the image gallery.

Here, you can see an example of a created gallery with the FooGallery. It includes multiple gallery templates with free and pro versions. You can see a responsive and basic image gallery in the below image. It already provides all the valuable free tools, like Changing the Width of the images and how they’ll be cropped in case you have a lightbox or not.

Pricing

FooGallery Pricing

The Core plugin is free, but you’ll have to pay for the premium version if you want extra and advanced features. For example, the Pro version will allow you to add videos and sliders to the gallery. But still, the free version has an incredible number of gallery customizations. So, make sure you try the free version entirely before you go for a premium version.

The premium or Pro versions price starts at $59 per year with single site support. It has a 4.7 rating on WordPress.org with 200,000+ active installations. In addition, it has the most straightforward interface, which can be understood easily by beginners.

2. NextGEN Gallery

NextGEN Gallery – WordPress Gallery plugin

The NextGEN Gallery plugin is one of the most popular plugins of WordPress.org, which allows you to display attractive galleries. It already receives 1.5 million downloads per year which continue. Imagely develops this plugin, and all the developers are amazing photographers too.

The free version provides two main styles: a slideshow and another one is a thumbnail gallery. Then it also provides two album styles, compact and extended. But the free version gallery designs are not that good looking, but it’s highly customizable, and it has profound functionality. It provides a wide array of options like Controlling size, style and transactions. It also has a function for timing and controls. 

This plugin is very popular with photographers and those who work with the image for a living. It provides Lightbox support, which also has customizations and effects. For example, you can make it more attractive, which looks good with your website design.

Its premium version has a bundle of features that are too useful to create and manage the image gallery. It also provides eCommerce functionality to sell your images online. Then the premium plan enables image protection, too, which will help you with the copyright issue. Then it also allows image deep linking with lightbox galleries. It also has a reliable interface that beginners can easily understand.

Let’s discuss why we use this plugin as your Gallery plugin, and there are some reasons we can talk about:

  1. We can create unique and attractive galleries on our website that look so much better than default galleries.
  2. It also provides an Image Comment system, which will help you to engage more visitors. This plugin also offers social sharing features, and we can sell our photos with the NextGEN pro plan.
  3. This plugin provides too many designs and layouts that you can form.

Here, you can see an example of the gallery created by this plugin. It is displayed with a basic thumbnails style, but you can customize them. Then we will discuss the feature list of this plugin.

Features

  • With the NextGEN Gallery plugin, you can create albums of different galleries. It will help you to display lots of pictures and media when extensive galleries are required.
  • The pro plan provides some unique features like Watermark, Deep Image linking and many more. These tools are beneficial when you are selling images in an e-store.
  • It provides options to show galleries in compact and extended layouts in a free version. In simple words, it allows you to choose between a long list gallery or a consolidated design.
  • Image sharing is also possible with Social sharing buttons, and it also allows us to send emails.
  • This plugin provides a comments section that is not mandatory, and we can turn it off. But it will help you to engage the visitors on your website.
  • We can also create slideshow galleries, and it also has many different designs for slideshow galleries. It will depend on which version of the plugin you have, and you will have more in case you have a pro plugin.
  • NextGEN gallery plugin also provides full support for eCommerce functionality, and it will be helpful if you have an image selling website.
  • It will provide unique alternatives to your regular, everyday grid galleries. Some of them also include thumbnail galleries, list albums and blog style galleries.
  • The pro plan also allows you to sell your image online, and it will automatically generate the sales tax when you sell the photos.
  • It can accept payments via some popular gateways like Stripe and PayPal.
  • The Print Lab feature is available, and it will help you print the images with a reputable printer.
  • If you’re selling your photos online, this plugin also allows you to offer different coupons to increase the sales numbers.

Pricing

NextGEN Gallery Pricing

The free version of this plugin is pretty basic, it does not have that many features, but it’s enough to display basic galleries on the website. After that, they provide a pro plan which will cost you around $79. It will come with a vast feature list, as we discussed in the feature list. And also, they have been actively adding a lot more features like slideshow galleries, arrows and slider’s timing etc. But we strongly recommended the free plugin first because the pro plugin is too expensive.

This plugin has 4.3 out of 5 stars and already has more than 800,000+ active installations.

3. Modula

The Best WordPress Image & Video Gallery plugin - WP Modula

Modula plugin is one of the most famous and highly user-friendly plugins available in WordPress.org. This plugin allows you to quickly create exciting photo and video galleries for your WordPress website. It was introduced by macho themes, Which provides a range of flexible customization options, and we can easily tweak our image gallery to an attractive and intractable gallery.

This plugin is available in two tiers; the first one is a basic plan, which will provide a few minor settings. After that, you can display the gallery into neat grid images, and you can stop here if you get enough settings and features that you require in a gallery plugin.

The second type is Advanced; you can completely modify the gallery looks and functionality in this plan. The free plugin allows you so many basic settings like image resizes, controlling heights, widths and aspect ratio etc. The Modula Image Gallery plugin is compatible with some of the block editors like Elementor and Beaver Builder.

The free plugin also has so many features like animations and a lightbox. It can pull the titles and details automatically from the image’s metadata. We can also add social media buttons on the gallery to make social sharing easy. We can also add mouse hover and loading time effects to attract visitors.

The Modula plugin offers filterable galleries, and the users can click on a category tag to filter out the gallery item with that tag. This feature is truly beneficial for the portfolios, and they can use the different filter types to engage the visitors. It also has many options for the lightbox and animation effects.

You can also add more than 20 images in the free version. The free version of this plugin is available on the WordPress library, and it will come with basic Grid galleries. But you can Customize it with the customization options like margins, shadows, border-radius and more. In short, we can completely alter the gallery design and looks, and you can see an example gallery which is created with the Modula gallery plugin. Then we will talk about the feature list of this plugin one by one briefly.

Features

  • This plugin allows you to create a lightbox gallery easily, and it also includes some unique lightbox styles, which are very helpful to create beautiful galleries.
  • This plugin provides advanced customization tools which will help you to customize the Galleries with CSS codes. These tools are not for beginners, and this tool needs advanced CSS codes; you can add some custom codes if you have some knowledge about HTML and CSS code.
  • Modula plugin provides a drag and drop interface for customization, and it will make the gallery creation process too quickly.
  • We can generate different albums, and these albums will help you organize the media files like images and videos.
  • All the Galleries are ready to use and fully responsive, it will look great on all screen size devices like iPad and Mobile phones.
  • This plugin also provides social sharing buttons on the gallery, and it will help your visitor share the gallery file to the social media networks. You can even send emails to share the post and images.
  • This plugin also supports the Watermark feature, and this feature will help you to protect the images.
  • One of the most special critical features provided by this plugin is Image optimization and speed extension. This plugin will optimize every image uploaded to your gallery, which will also help us speed up the site load.
  • We can also add image entry animations like sliding and rotate. You will also have more than 40 built-in mouse hover effects, and it will help you grab the visitors attention. 
  • This plugin also allows advanced tools for video embedding to the galleries. It just takes a couple of clicks to link videos.
  • This plugin also allows GIFs to your galleries, and you can fill your entire galleries with moving images. It can also attract visitors.
  • The best feature for the digital stores that sell their photographs online is, the modula plugin provides image protections that will disable right click and download options on your photos.
  • Lastly, we can use shortcodes to display the galleries anywhere on the website. You can say it between the post, on the page and sometimes on Widget areas.

Pricing

Modula Pricing

Modula plugin mainly provides Grid Galleries, and this plugin is an expert in this. Most of the features are included in free versions; if you want more layouts and some unique slideshows, you can purchase a pro plan. The pro plan starts with $39 with single site support. This plugin also has the maximum rating, 4.7 out of 5 stars on WordPress.org with 70,000+ active installations.

4. Envira Gallery

Envira Gallery - Best Responsive WordPress Gallery Plugin

Envira Gallery plugin is another popular plugin launched by Nathan Singh in early 2018. This plugin comes with both a free lite version and a fully-featured advanced tools premium version. There are some brands which use free plugins on their website. They are satisfied because the free plugin has all the features required to display a perfect gallery.

But still, some cool features are reserved for the premium version. But the Lite version also has some fantastic features, like you can choose several columns, and it also has a lightbox popup feature. It also supports Lazy Loading and Image Optimization, which will help you to load your content speedily.

The Envira plugin’s interface is similar to the modula plugin; this plugin’s interface is also designed to make it as easy as possible. There are many appreciable features available, for instance, social media integration, which also has support to import Instagram images.

The Envira Gallery also fully supports eCommerce with WooCommerce. This plugin also comes with Video Support and Deep linking, and pagination features for more extensive galleries. But, all the components are not free; the free version comes with basic galleries and some essential tools. We need to buy a premium version of this plugin for the advanced tools, which is not that costly.

This plugin also provides some features which are required for a professional photographer. Its auto-watermark quality will help you to keep the images safe. Not only that, but it also allows image protection features like disabling right-click and downloading issue. Enviry will enable you to display different layouts and design, and here you can see an example of a Gallery created by this plugin. Then after we talk about the features provided by this plugin.

Features

  • The Envira Plugin’s interface is well-designed, and the best part of this plugin is, it also provides a drag and drop builder. It has the simplest image insertion method, and you can drop the images on the gallery and click on publish button. There’s no need for code.
  • This plugin provides some helpful addon tools, for example, WooCommerce integrations, Support for Proofing, Lightroom and more. We can interact with this plugin with the WooCommerce plugin and sell the images online through gateways like Paypal and Stripe.
  • The Pro version has some most advanced features required for a perfect matching gallery for your website.
  • This plugin also has video support with the Pro version, which means we can also embed video files on the galleries.
  • The social sharing option is the most helpful tool nowadays, and people can easily share their business or personal talks with the world easily. This plugin allows you to share the images and files on social media networks.
  • This plugin allows you to assign tags and categories; with the help of this feature, we can easily organize and manage the media files.
  • We can also link out social media pages and reveal the images and video from those social media networks to our galleries.
  • This plugin also allows deep linking for more information, and the user will interact with the images and get more info with the help of this tool.
  • The Envira Gallery plugin is a unique plugin that offers Gutenberg blocks to display the galleries anywhere on the website. 
  • The most important feature of this plugin, it is fully responsive, and the galleries and images snap into places depending on the screen size.

Pricing

Envira Gallery Pricing

Many people will consider the Envira Gallery plugin as your gallery plugin. But some of those will not recommend this plugin because of price and some other issues. But first, you must try it before you choose this is the right plugin for you. If the money is the only mandatory issue to look out for, I recommend picking a different plugin than Envira Gallery.

The Envira Free plugin is also available but with some limited tools and designs. Then the basic premium version will start from $29 for a single site, and you can also pay $69 if you want a fully-featured pro version of this plugin. This plugin has an impressive review as 4.8 out of 5 on WordPress.org with 100,00+ downloads.

5. Photo Gallery by 10Web

Photo Gallery by 10Web Banner

The Photo Gallery by 10Web plugin is also one of the most popular WordPress websites. This plugin has the highest number of downloads, and this plugin comes with deep functionality. This plugin also offers an eCommerce extension to sell the images online, but this feature is only available with the Pro version.

The free version has some basic layouts like Grid formats galleries which also looks good. The admin interface is excellent, it’s easy to use, and anyone can easily understand it. We can immediately add the images with a couple of clicks. Then you can directly publish it on your website.

The free version also has some unique features like, it already has video support to create video galleries. The free version of this plugin comes with Automatic watermarking support. You can also create albums by dividing them into categories called albums. Even the free version allows you to import Instagram photos to your website.

This plugin doesn’t have that many settings, so don’t worry about how to use it. Even this plugin is here as an ideal interface for all experience levels. Still, you have any requirement for advanced gallery designs, like cropped images or masonic arrangements, then you can buy a premium plugin.

The Photo Gallery by 10Web plugin allows you to create unlimited galleries and unlimited albums into the galleries. One of the best key features of the Photo Gallery by 10Web plugin is that we can easily create video galleries with the help of this plugin. You can also use the mix and match feature if you want a gallery with both images and videos.

There aren’t that many customization tools available in the free version, but still, we create a basic gallery using the free plugin. You can have more designs with the help of premium versions. So, you can see an example image of the gallery created by this plugin. Now let’s discuss all the features provided by this plugin.

Features

  • The Photo Gallery by 10Web plugin allows us to create a gallery including image and video files, but this feature will only be available for the premium versions.
  • It also offers addons for some advanced features like, we can display Facebook albums and sell our digital contents online.
  • This plugin is also capable of amplifying the SEO effectively. For example, this plugin allows us to insert relevant tags and metadata.
  • The lightbox popup is also available in this plugin with more than 15 slideshow effects. It works smoothly on mobile devices, and the slideshow effects are here to attract visitors. It also helps your visitor to scroll through the images quickly.
  • Image comments and community are also possible with this plugin, and this feature will help you generate the conversation and engage visitors.
  • This plugin supports both audio and video embedding, and It means the musicians and other audio-centric businesses can present their work on this plugin.
  • We can pull the media from most famous networks like YouTube, Instagram, Flicker and Vimeo.
  • The Photo Gallery by 10Web plugin provides some preloaded themes to start the designing process. Then you can use the customization tools that will help you customize the image size and gallery colours that can look better for your website.
  • Some of the best features are given free by this plugin, like Facebook Albums and selling their digital stores.
  • It comes with a handful of widgets tools that help us add the galleries easily and quickly into the sidebars and footers.
  • This plugin comes with a social sharing option that is turned off by default. You can enable it in case you want the social network sharing buttons on the galleries.
  • This plugin has one excellent gallery style called a Blog-style. It gives you the feel of reading blogs using this gallery.

Pricing

Photo Gallery by 10Web Pricing

Like other plugins, this plugin also has some cool templates and designs but only with the premium version. But in case you buy the premium plugin, it will take you to the next level of creating attractive galleries. The price of the premium plugin is $30 for a single site license. The price will increase if you add any more functionality. This plugin has 4.6 out of 5 stars, and it has 300,000+ active installations.

6. Portfolio Gallery

Portfolio Gallery Banner

The Portfolio Gallery plugin offers stunning and attractive Galleries for your WordPress website. It doesn’t require any codes like CSS and Other HTML designing codes. The sad news is this plugin does not support Gutenberg block, but still, it has a straightforward gallery design process that will take a few minutes.

Both types of regular users or novice don’t have any understanding issues with the interface of this plugin. It can create beautiful galleries which are most beneficial to engage the users on your website. Its core plugin is available for free, but we have to buy the premium membership of this plugin for some premium features.

This plugin is chosen in this article just because of its backend interface. It has the most straightforward backed management interface, and it will feel somewhat annoying for the first time. The primary plugin has some advanced features like animations and mouse hover effects which are too helpful for visitor engagement.

We can display these galleries with the Shortcodes; paste it wherever you want. You can even use it between the post or on any widget area. Here, you can see an image of the gallery just below this paragraph. This gallery is created with simple tools without any advanced features. It looks nice, but still, it can be customizable. So, now let’s discuss some features of this plugin one by one briefly.

Features

  • The Lightbox works beautifully, fully responsive and well managed on every device and screen sizes like Mobile, Desktops and laptops, iPads and iPhones, and Android. 
  • You can create the gallery with multiple columns in just a couple of clicks on the setting page of this plugin. Some plugins change for this feature.
  • We can add some information about the images on the galleries like text, captions, filters and numbers. It is a unique and valuable feature when you have a hotel booking or tour and travellers website.
  • We can customize each element of the gallery-like Coors, margins spacing and image roundness.
  • It has image optimizations and hovers effect support, which will help you decrease the loading time with excellent effects.
  • This plugin also provides a Custom CSS area which can be helpful for the developers who want complete control of the gallery.
  • This plugin includes filters for most of the galleries which you inserted on your website. In this way, we can turn our website into filterable portfolios, which will drive ease to the visitors and users.
  • This plugin comes with a few templates which are created for portfolio websites. It includes masonry formats and regular grid styles.

Pricing

Portfolio Gallery Pricing

The primary reason behind the comparison of this plugin is the features it provides with the free version. It comes with each required feature which we can need with a gallery plugin. The free plugin has all the features like a Light popup box and customization support. But still, you want to upgrade the plugin with a premium version, and it will cost you around $25, allowing you to use some more exciting features. The total rating of this plugin on WordPress.org is 4.8 out of 5 stars with 10,000+ active installations.

Conclusion: We hope the provided information is helpful to you, and now you can choose the best gallery plugin for your website. If you are still confused, You can let us know your questions in the comment section given below. We will get back to you with help as soon as possible.

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