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WordPress Guide → Plugins → Best Photo Gallery
5 best photo gallery plugins for WordPress
Whether you’re a travel blogger, food blogger or fashion blogger showing off vacation spots, delicious meals, and outfit choices, or you’re a photographer, destination, or retail shop highlighting your brand experience, at some point you’re going need to add a gallery of photos or several photo galleries to your WordPress website.
And, because you know website performance and page load speed affect search engine rankings and how long a visitor stays on your site, you need a robust photo gallery solution that keeps your site running fast.
We put together the five best WordPress plugins for photos and videos.
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The 5 best WordPress photo gallery plugins
Here are the five best WordPress gallery plugins you should consider (in no particular order).
1. Modula Gallery
Modula Gallery is a new freemium gallery plugin that makes it easy to build stunning lightbox galleries, masonry grids, custom grids and more in no more than a few clicks right from the WordPress dashboard. It’s perfect for WordPress site owners who want to create beautiful galleries without a lot of work or technical requirements.
This plugin gives you the power to choose everything from the height and width of your responsive image gallery down to the resizing of individual images within the container. It also includes 12 cross-browser compatible hover effects that work perfectly on mobile devices along with six easy-to-use lightbox styles that seamlessly integrate with your galleries.
The Modula Pro premium version adds more features, including:
- Increased number of images per gallery
- Add videos to your galleries with the premium Modula Video Extension
- Let visitors sort through your gallery by applying filters
- Additional lightbox styles and effects
- Image loading animations
- Custom CSS options
Price: Module Lite is free. Module Pro starts at $25 for a single site, $55 for two sites, $85 for three sites and $115 for unlimited sites.
2. NextGEN Gallery
NextGEN Gallery is one of the oldest image gallery plugins in the WordPress plugin repository and one of the most downloaded. This freemium plugin is harder to use than some of the other WordPress photo gallery options listed, the user interface isn’t as seamless and intuitive, and there is a learning curve, but the free version is robust and includes features only available in the premium version of other plugins.
The free version of NextGEN provides two main gallery styles (slideshows and thumbnail galleries) and two album styles (compact and extended), all of which come with a wide array of options for controlling size, style, timing, transitions, controls, lightbox effects, and more.
The NextGEN Gallery Extensions add more features, including:
- Additional gallery styles
- Social sharing
- Image comments
- Deep linking for lightbox galleries
- ecommerce integration for selling photos
- Image protection like preventing image downloads and adding watermarks
Price: NextGEN Gallery is free. The premium extensions range in price from $79 to $139 based on the features you need.
3. FooGallery
FooGallery is another freemium WordPress plugin that lets you easily add responsive photo galleries to your website using an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. The FooGallery custom widget can display galleries in any widget-ready area of your website. Additionally, the new Gutenberg block includes live previews of your galleries, while the plugin has built-in support for higher quality thumbnails on retina-enabled displays. It also includes the lazy loading of images, several different gallery templates, custom CSS options, and more.
The FooGallery Pro premium version adds more features, including:
- 11 Hover effect presets
- Media categories and tags and gallery filtering
- Additional gallery templates and pagination options
- Infinite scroll
- The ability to create video galleries
- Bulk copy gallery settings
Price: FooGallery is free. The premium version, FooGallery Pro starts at $49 for a single site.
4. Envira Gallery
Envira Gallery is a freemium WordPress gallery plugin that makes adding a photo gallery to your site fast even if you’re a beginner. The free Lite version gives you control over the number of columns in your gallery, the lightbox, and lazy loading of images and even has some basic social sharing options. The easy-to-use drag-and-drop gallery builder is responsive so your grid or masonry galleries will look good on devices of all sizes.
The Envira Gallery premium versions add more features including:
- Additional gallery templates and display options
- Image protection like preventing image downloads, adding watermarks, and adding passwords to galleries.
- WooCommerce integration for selling photos
- Social media integration and the ability to import images from Instagram
- The ability to create video galleries
- Deep linking and pagination for large galleries
- Lightroom integration to sync photo galleries with Adobe Lightroom collections
Price: Envira Gallery Lite is free. The premium version starts at $29 for those who are just getting started, but if you want all of the gallery features, the Pro package is $99.
5. Photo Gallery
Photo Gallery is a freemium gallery plugin for WordPress that allows you to create simple photo galleries, photo albums, and galleries from embedded videos. It also includes support for videos hosted on sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and Instagram and widgets to display your albums. This plugin is excessive for a site owner who just wants to create beautiful photo galleries. Also, the best gallery layouts, like masonry and mosaic, are only available in the premium version.
The Photo Gallery premium version adds more features, including:
- Additional gallery styles
- ecommerce integration with Paypal and Stripe
- 15 slideshow effects
- Social sharing and Instagram integration
- Image commenting
- Mix-and-match galleries with both images and videos
- Facebook integration to display Facebook photos and videos
Price: Photo Gallery is free. The premium versions range from $30 for the Basic option to $100 for the Plugins Bundle.
Bonus: JetPack
Jetpack is a free, multi-purpose WordPress plugin from Automattic that adds WordPress.com features to self-hosted WordPress sites.
Jetpack’s Tiled Galleries module allows you to display images in a rectangular mosaic, a square mosaic, and a circular grid within the native WordPress media library. It’s a great option if you don’t need the robust features of the more robust gallery options listed above or you’re already using Jetpack on your site. Also, if you use a lot of images on your website and don’t have a CDN, Jetpack’s Site Accelerator (formerly Photon) helps pages load faster by leveraging the WordPress.com CDN.
Getting started with a photo gallery plugin for WordPress
A good photo gallery on your website is important for more than just photography businesses: ecommerce sites need good product pics, restaurants need to show off those beautiful plates, and more.
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Additional resources
What is a WordPress plugin? →
A complete beginner’s guide to WordPress plugins and how to manage them
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Make it easy for your audience to get in touch through your website!
How to check if a plugin is safe →
Simple steps to evaluating a plugin before you install and activate it