Top 10 WordPress Gallery Plugins Reviewed and Compared (2024)

Are you looking for the best WordPress gallery plugins?

By default, you can use images from your WordPress media library to add a thumbnail gallery to your website. It will be a simple, responsive image gallery with limited options.

If you want to create beautiful and feature-rich image galleries, you’ll want to use a WordPress gallery plugin.

You will find a dozen different gallery plugins on the market. And each plugin can offer something unique like beautiful transitions, great user experience, image protection, gallery styles, and much more.

In this article, we are going to share some of the best WordPress gallery plugins on the market. But before that, let’s take a quick look at how you should choose a gallery plugin in the first place.

How to choose an image gallery plugin for WordPress?

As we have already mentioned, WordPress comes with a built-in image gallery and photo album, but the default gallery lacks basic features like lightbox gallery, pagination, carousel, etc.

When choosing a gallery plugin for WordPress, there are a few things to consider.

• Advanced Features: Almost all gallery plugins include all the necessary features. But there are times when you’ll want to extend basic functionality through add-ons or custom CSS. Before investing in a gallery plugin, it’s worth taking a moment to examine the features it offers and ask yourself if it can meet your needs.
• Ease of Use: Having a feature-rich plugin is great, but you need to find the right WordPress gallery plugin that fits your workflow and is easy to use at the same time. You also need to make sure that your image gallery plugin is compatible with the Gutenberg block editor as some of the WordPress themes may discontinue the old classic editor in the future.
• Speed: Images account for the majority of bytes downloaded from any website. And, a photographer, artist, or publisher may want to display a photo gallery with hover effects or animations. Now, as much as performance and speed depend on WordPress hosting and bandwidth, it’s also important to choose a gallery plugin that doesn’t compromise on speed at all.
• Updates : Your gallery plugin may have compatibility issues with new versions of WordPress if it is not updated regularly. When choosing a WordPress gallery plugin, you want to make sure that it is maintained and supported by a team you can trust.
• SEO Optimization: Everything you add to your website should contribute to increasing your traffic . With features like alt attributes, image compression, and shortened URLs, you can boost your site’s SEO.

Now that you know how to choose a gallery plugin, let’s look at some of the best WordPress gallery plugins available on the market.

The Best WordPress Image Gallery Plugins

Below you will find both paid and free WordPress image gallery plugins. Each plugin will allow you to add image galleries and photo albums to your website with some unique features.

1. Envira Gallery

Envira Gallery is the best WordPress gallery plugin that is easy to use and powerful. It comes with a set of pre-built templates and a drag-and-drop image gallery builder to customize the look of your gallery quickly.

Unlike other popular WordPress gallery plugins, Envira is lightweight and not bloated. It comes with all the essential features out of the box. You can easily enhance the basic functionalities by installing one of its two dozen add-ons.

Some of the main features of Envira Gallery are:

• Drag & Drop Builder – Create beautiful galleries in seconds with just a few clicks.
• Responsive and mobile-friendly : Every gallery you build with Envira is 100% responsive and retina-ready, meaning it will work perfectly on mobile devices, tablets, and desktop computers.
• Standalone Galleries : Create standalone galleries that are not linked to your posts and pages.
• Tons of Addons: You can find an extensive collection of addons, such as Social sharing, Videos, WooCommerce, Deeplinking, and Watermarking – just to name a few.

The Envira Gallery Deeplinking addon allows you to create separate links for all images in your gallery. You can also add password protection to your galleries and share the separate links with your users to access your WordPress gallery.

Envira Gallery features a lazy loading feature that reduces page loading time. You can also add as many images to your gallery as you want, and it will add an infinite scroll to your page automatically.

Envira Gallery Pricing: There is a lite version of estonia phone number library Envira available for download from the WordPress repository, which offers limited features.

2. Smash Balloon Instagram Feed

Instagram Feed Pro by Smash Balloon is not a normal photo gallery plugin. Still, it is our top choice on this list because it is a powerful tool that you can use to import images from Instagram and create beautiful photo galleries.

Once added to your site, top 5 wordpress product grid plugins for 2024 all you have to do is connect your Instagram account. The plugin then automatically fetches your Instagram feed and displays it in a neat gallery layout on your site.

You can fully customize the look of your feed. For example, you can match it to your website theme and change the gallery layout to display as a carousel or pop-up lightbox.

Some of the key features of Smash Balloon Instagram Feed are:

• Responsive and Fast : Your gallery will look great on all devices and Smash Balloon uses post caching for super fast loading times.
• No Limitations : Display as many galleries as you like, either on the same page or across your entire site.
• Caching Backup System : Ensures your images always display, even if there is a problem with Instagram.
• Shoppable Links : Create “shoppable” links for your images to make monetizing your site easy. Users interested in purchasing a product can click on the link to go directly to the product page.

Now, you may not want to display every single post on your website, so Smash Balloon lets you filter your feed by hashtag, media type, and more.

After you configure the plugin settings, it will continue to run on its own, pulling fresh content from your Instagram social media account as you create new posts.

Pricing plans start at $49 per year. There is an All Access package for $299 for unlimited sites.

The All Access Bundle plan comes with all of Smash Balloon’s products, including Instagram Feed Pro, Custom Twitter Feeds Pro, Feeds for YouTube Pro, Custom Facebook Feed Pro, and Social Wall Pro.

And there is also a lite version of the plugin sms to data available for download from the WordPress repository.

3. NextGEN Gallery

NextGEN Gallery is one of the most popular WordPress gallery plugins. It comes with all the features you will ever need out of the box to create professional website galleries.

The gallery plugin offers multiple ways to organize your images, upload them in batches, import metadata from your photos, and group galleries into albums.

Check out these NextGEN gallery features:

• Photo Proofs: Engage your clients from start to finish by showing them test photos before delivering the final images.
• Image Protection: Disable the option to right-click and drag to download from your galleries.
• Automated Print Fulfillment: Send print-sized files to clients directly without the need for any additional plugins.
• Mosaic & Masonry Gallery: Beautiful gallery layouts to create custom grids and flexible galleries.

After uploading your images to your WordPress site, you can group them together to create a slideshow or thumbnail gallery. NextGen Gallery offers eCommerce features and many other powerful features that a professional photographer needs.

The free version of the plugin offers two main gallery styles and two album styles. On the other hand, the professional version includes premium galleries, a professional lightbox with image comments, and social sharing features.

NextGen Gallery Prices: Starting at 69.50

Pro and Lifetime plans also give you free access to all Imagely themes.

Get started with NextGEN Gallery today.

4. Modulates

Modula is an easy-to-use WordPress image gallery plugin. It allows you to customize the images in your website’s photo gallery, similar to the image gallery on a basic smartphone, where you can easily crop, resize or drag photos around.

The plugin displays an instant preview of the changes you make to your gallery, so you don’t have to go back and forth between the WordPress dashboard and the gallery page builder.

These are some of the main features of Modula:

• Image Gallery Styles: You can create a grid gallery with Module and the best thing is that it allows you to resize the images within the gallery preview to get the look you need.
• Video Galleries: Create photo and video galleries within the same gallery.
• Photo Gallery Albums – Use multiple images from an image gallery to create a photo album.
• Gallery Filters: Assign tags and categories to your images that you can use as filters to sort your photos.

The free version of Modula can be downloaded from the official WordPress.org directory, and comes with limited features. If you want full access to the plugin, you will need to upgrade to the pro version.

Modula Pricing: Offers three different pricing plans ranging from $39 – $99/year.

Each of these plans offers priority support for one year, basic tutorials, password protection, advanced shortcode, right-click protection, and much more.

Start using Modula today.

5. FooGallery

FooGallery is one of the best image gallery plugins for WordPress. It allows you to create beautiful, responsive and retina-ready image galleries in just a few clicks.

With FooGallery, you can organize your images however you like using its drag-and-drop reordering capability. It also lets you choose a gallery template for your needs, so you don’t always have to create an image gallery from scratch.

Some of the plugin features include:

• Lazy Loading Photos: Reduce page load time by loading only the images visible to users on the screen.
• Beautiful Gallery Templates – Use the built-in Slider Gallery, Custom Grid Gallery, and Polaroid Gallery templates to quickly add photo galleries in WordPress.
• Thumbnail Filter Effects – Add eye-catching effects to your image thumbnails to attract users at the first glance.
• Advanced Pagination: Multiple pagination types to create image gallery carousels, lazy loading galleries, infinite scrolling galleries and more.

It is an easy plugin to develop and comes with dozens of hooks and filters so you can easily customize the plugin to your clients’ needs.

FooGallery Pricing: There is a personal plan that is Forever FREE. Premium plans start at $33.99 per year.

The free FooGallery plugin is designed for beginners, startups, and small businesses to create basic image galleries. Pricing plans are available on monthly, annual, and lifetime payment terms.

Get started with FooGallery today.

6. WP Portfolio

WP Portfolio is a powerful portfolio plugin for WordPress. You can showcase websites, images, videos, and more to create a professional-looking portfolio for clients and customers to browse.

WP Portfolio allows you to import dummy websites that you can display as demos on your website so clients can see what you’re capable of.

Plus, you can upload images and videos to create beautiful galleries. In fact, creating business portfolios has never been easier. You can even use the plugin to upload teasers and trailers for upcoming events, music videos, movies, and more.

There is plenty of room to be creative with this plugin. Plus, WP Portfolio easily integrates with Elementor, Beaver Builder, and Visual Composer.

Here are its highlights:

• Unlimited Layouts: Use multiple layouts, including masonry grids, to best showcase your work
• Lightning Fast: Lightweight plugin that comes with lazy loading for faster page speed.
• Sort & Search: Sortable categories and search field so users can find relevant demos faster.
• Infinite Scrolling : Load countless images, videos and products