The best WordPress photo gallery plugins compared

Many websites include a nice image gallery. These can be used to convey a general image of the company, to present pictures of products in a visually appealing way or to sell photos. When creating a WordPress website, you will come across countless po­ten­tially useful WordPress gallery plug-ins in your search for a suitable tool. So, how do they differ and which functions are important? In the following, we will provide you with a com­par­is­on of the best-known plug-ins for photo galleries in WordPress.

When searching for a suitable WordPress gallery plug-in, you should be clear on the functions you need. There are many different features available a good image gallery plug-in provides:

• Different formats: Image galleries are not all the same. The layout of a website will determine how well different formats work. Whether it be tiled, masonry style or mosaic galleries, a good WordPress gallery plug-in will give you multiple styles to choose from.
• Lightbox view: In WordPress photo galleries, images are displayed as small thumb­nails, which vary depending on the layout. To give users a closer look at your images, you should have a lightbox view which opens to display the image in a large size when they click on it.
• An­im­a­tions and effects: An­im­a­tions and effects attract the user’s attention when scrolling over images.
• Op­tim­isa­tion for mobile devices: The plug-in’s image gallery should be mobile friendly so that browsers can display the image gallery on all devices in an at­tract­ive and user-friendly format.
• Image op­tim­isa­tion: If a gallery contains many images, this can increase the website’s load time. Using functions like “lazy loading” and image size op­tim­iz­a­tion, the load time can be reduced.
• In­di­vidu­al cus­tom­isa­tion: A good WordPress gallery plug-in will enable you to quickly and easily customise an image gallery to match your branding so that the image gallery can seam­lessly fit into your website design.
• Image pro­tec­tion: Some gallery plug-ins provide functions that prevent others from copying and using your images. You should ensure that a similar function is available when choosing a plug-in (e.g. wa­ter­mark­ing, disabling right-click).
• E-commerce links: E-commerce links enable you to quickly and easily sell images on your website.
• Drag-and-drop editor: The easiest way to organise images in­di­vidu­ally in a gallery is with an intuitive drag-and-drop editor.
• Image links: In terms of SEO and user ex­per­i­ence design, deep links are important for guiding users to more detailed in­form­a­tion about an image.

In addition to the functions listed above, many WordPress gallery plug-ins offer other useful features that may be of value depending on the use case. Before creating an image gallery, you should first compare and test the functions and usability of the plug-ins. We have already done this for you with four of the most popular WordPress ex­ten­sions.

All the WordPress gallery plug-ins we have covered can be used to create beautiful image galleries. Their dif­fer­ences only become apparent when you take a closer look at the details. To give you a clearer overview of the different tools, we have compared their features in the table below: