To really wow visitors with stylish galleries of images on your WordPress website, you’re best off with a gallery plugin.
If you’re a photographer looking to exhibit and sell your work online, a resort manager looking to display captivating images of your property, an eCommerce store owner seeking to present an engaging stream of product photos — or you’re anything in between — guess what?
WordPress photo gallery plugins offer the essential tools and features you need to create beautiful, organized photo galleries that capture your audience’s attention and leave a lasting impression.
But with an abundance of gallery plugins available, it’s daunting to narrow down your options and find the most suitable one.
That’s why we’ve evaluated a variety of photo gallery plugins for WordPress, and we bring you a curated list of the top options for 2024.
Do you actually need a plugin for photo galleries in WordPress?
WordPress comes with a built-in gallery function. Although this default tool manages basic image displays, it lacks versatility and customization options.
Users who frequently showcase photos on their websites will want more features because they need their images to make a significant impact.
Using the native WordPress image gallery can even contribute to a negative user experience on your website.
For one thing, image galleries created with the default WordPress tool are not responsive: They won’t look the same on different screen sizes, meaning users on less popular devices may see a mess when they load up your pictures.
Second, the gallery layouts on the default tool are quite simplistic and thus unlikely to capture attention or inspire engagement from your audience.
This is where photo gallery plugins come in. These tools empower you to build your own image galleries with a unique aesthetic, customize them to your specific needs and optimize them for a positive user experience.
The benefits of using WordPress photo gallery plugins
WordPress photo gallery plugins provide several compelling benefits. Here are the most notable ones.
Advanced layouts and customization
Photo gallery plugins offer a wide range of prebuilt layouts, such as grid, carousel, slideshow and masonry. This enables you to showcase images in multiple formats, adding versatility to your website’s visual content.
Furthermore, photo gallery plugins come with a wide range of customization settings. As a result, you have great control over the styles, transitions and other visual elements of your galleries. To create a truly unique look and achieve a precise vision, experiment with as many of the settings as possible.
User experience enhancements
A picture gallery plugin offers additional features that enhance user experience on your website.
For example, a lightbox lets users view a larger version of your images without leaving the current page. Advanced categorization, organization and image filtering features allow users to easily sort and find specific content within your galleries.
Social sharing
Photo gallery plugins often include social sharing buttons. With one or two clicks, visitors can effortlessly post their favorite images across various social media platforms, promoting your website to a new audience and potentially attracting more visitors.
eCommerce integration
For anyone building a photography website to sell their work online, the best WordPress gallery plugins seamlessly integrate with eCommerce solutions like WooCommerce. This popular online store plugin enables visitors to make purchases directly on your WordPress site.
Responsive design
Unlike the default WordPress gallery, many plugins have a responsive design, meaning the galleries automatically adapt your images based on the different screen sizes, devices and browsers of your visitors.
This ensures your images look great on desktops, tablets and smartphones, providing a consistent and enjoyable experience for all users.
Search engine optimization
Photo gallery plugins are typically designed with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind. Most seamlessly integrate with popular SEO plugins for WordPress. Using a gallery plugin, you can add image titles, alt tags and metadata, which all help SEO.
The result is a higher ranking on Google, which means more organic traffic to your website.
Ultimately, a WordPress photo gallery plugin can enhance your website’s visual appeal, user experience, eCommerce capability, SEO and social reach.
Ultimately, a WordPress photo gallery plugin can enhance your website’s visual appeal, user experience, eCommerce capability, SEO and social reach.
Now consider some of the best gallery plugin options in 2024. All the plugins on this list have both a free and a premium version.
Best photo gallery plugins for WordPress
- Envira Gallery
- NextGEN Gallery
- FooGallery
- Modula Gallery
- Photo Gallery by 10Web
- Gmedia Photo Gallery
- Responsive Lightbox and Gallery
- Meow Gallery
- Robo Gallery
1. Envira Gallery
Envira Gallery is a great option for WordPress owners looking for a user-friendly solution to showcase visual content on their websites. It has an intuitive interface and comes with a wide range of prebuilt gallery templates. Using the plugin’s drag-and-drop builder, you can nearly effortlessly create beautiful galleries with a few clicks.
The Elvira plugin uses a responsive design. The galleries you create will adapt flawlessly to various devices, guaranteeing an optimal viewing experience for all visitors.
Additionally, Envira boasts WooCommerce integration. This feature allows you to combine your media displays with an online store. Meanwhile, social sharing buttons let visitors easily share your photos across different platforms.
The plugin also has deep linking and pagination features that make your galleries SEO-friendly.
Envira Gallery does more than photos — it allows you to embed videos from YouTube, Vimeo, Daily Motion and Twitch. You can even upload your own videos.
With this plugin, you need not worry about unauthorized use of your images. Several gallery protection features, like watermarking and passwords, are available to safeguard your work.
Key features:
- Multiple gallery templates to choose from
- Intuitive drag-and-drop builder
- Responsive design
- Social media integration
- eCommerce support
Best WordPress photo gallery plugin for: Professional artists and models.
Price: Free with limited features. The premium plan starts at $26 per year.
2. NextGEN Gallery
There are many things to like about the NextGEN gallery plugin, which has been around since 2007 and is still popular. It has a diverse array of album and gallery styles — including thumbnail, grid, slideshow, masonry and mosaic.
NextGEN provides a drag-and-drop approach to image uploading and sorting that simplifies the process of creating galleries.
This WordPress photo gallery plugin offers several photo editing options, such as cropping, resizing and rotating, which gives you convenient control over the appearance of images in your galleries.
If you use Adobe Lightroom, note that NextGEN has an add-on to automatically create and sync galleries from your Lightroom Collection.
The NextGEN gallery plugin is optimized for speed and search engine visibility, with features such as lazy loading, pagination, metadata retention and deep linking.
Another noteworthy feature of the NextGEN plugin is you can add hover capability to your galleries. Furthermore, a lightbox add-on lets users view full-scale images when opened.
Finally, this gallery has eCommerce support to sell your work directly from your website.
Key features:
- Drag-and-drop approach to image uploading and sorting
- eCommerce functionality
- Hover effects and lightbox feature
- Social sharing and image comments
Best WordPress photo gallery plugin for: Professional photographers.
Price: Free with limited features. The premium plans start at $49 per year.
3. FooGallery
FooGallery is another exceptional WordPress photo gallery plugin; it comes with a plethora of features to enhance how you showcase images on your website.
Changing the order of your images is almost effortless with this image gallery plugin, thanks to its drag-and-drop reordering feature.
The gallery layouts in FooGallery are optimized to reduce page load times, leading to a seamless browsing experience for your visitors. This includes a default lazy loading feature that conserves bandwidth since images are only loaded if they come into view.
In terms of SEO, FooGallery integrates with some of the most popular SEO plugins. Additionally, every single image displayed through this plugin is crawlable by search engines.
Password protection is available to protect individual galleries or albums from viewership by unauthorized visitors.
Key features:
- Performance-optimized gallery templates
- Drag-and-drop reordering
- Lazy loading to conserve bandwidth
- Integration with SEO plugins
- All images are crawlable by search engines
- Support for Gutenberg blocks
Best WordPress photo gallery plugin for: Bloggers and hobby photographers.
Price: Free with limited features. The premium plans start at $33.99 per year.
4. Modula Gallery
Modula Gallery’s ease of use makes it an excellent option for beginners and website owners with little to no technical knowledge. With this plugin, you’ll create beautiful and responsive galleries without hassle. In addition to images, Modula also supports video galleries.
The plugin’s specialty lies in grid galleries, which you can customize in countless ways using the drag-and-drop builder — or even custom CSS.
To protect your work from unauthorized use, try the image watermarking and right-click protection tools within this plugin.
Key features:
- Support for video galleries
- Drag and drop gallery builder
- Lightbox functionality
- Gallery protection features like right-click protection and watermarking
- Responsive design
Best WordPress photo gallery plugin for: Low maintenance, non-technical users.
Price: Free with limited features. The premium plans start at $39 per year.
5. Photo Gallery by 10Web
Photo Gallery by 10Web offers an attractive combination of simplicity and advanced features. Its user-friendly interface makes it a good option for beginners, while its extensive customization options provide creative control for experienced users.
The plugin offers 10 premium gallery layouts, including masonry, slideshow, carousel and blog style. It also offers a fully customizable lightbox with 15 lightbox transition effects.
Image watermarking and right-click protection options help you safeguard your work. All images and galleries are indexable by Google, increasing the odds of your pages appearing in the top search results.
The plugin doesn’t stop at images—it also supports audio and video, making it a comprehensive solution for all kinds of multimedia content.
Photo Gallery’s responsiveness means your galleries will look and function flawlessly across all devices or screen sizes.
Thanks to the social sharing capabilities, your users will enjoy seamless sharing of content across various platforms, promoting more interaction. You can also enable image commenting so visitors can leave their feedback.
Key features:
- 10 premium gallery layouts
- Audio and video support
- 100% responsive design and mobile-friendliness
- Customizable lightbox with 15 transition effects
- Social sharing add-ons
Best WordPress photo gallery plugin for: Beginners who plan to grow in experience.
Price: Free with limited features. The premium plans start at a total of $60 per year; note that the plans renew every six months.
6. Gmedia Photo Gallery
Gmedia Photo Gallery is another feature-rich and versatile plugin that delivers an exceptional gallery management experience for WordPress website owners.
The plugin provides 10 prebuilt gallery templates to choose from. You can modify these templates further by adding custom CSS styles or using the drag-and-drop builder.
In addition to images, the Gmedia photo gallery also features video and audio support, allowing you to embed MP3s. You can embed videos from YouTube and Vimeo or upload videos from your computer.
Furthermore, the plugin comes with a unique private status feature you can use to restrict gallery access from visitors unless they’re logged in.
Users will be able to share your images on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and more by using the social sharing add-on. Gmedia Photo Gallery also enables visitors to leave comments on your images.
Key features:
- Responsive and mobile friendly
- Drag-and-drop builder
- WordPress search integration
- Social sharing
- Private status feature
Best WordPress photo gallery plugin for: Resort owners and hospitality businesses.
Price: Free with limited features. For a one-time payment of $29.99, you can use this plugin on one website.
7. Responsive Lightbox and Gallery
The Responsive Lightbox and Gallery plugin has a lightweight nature that facilitates fast loading times. Due to its responsive design, you can be sure that all your galleries and media will look great, regardless of the device or browser that visitors use.
Its eCommerce product gallery features enable you to easily create product pages that drive results.
Another selling point is this plugin is compatible with page builders like Visual Composer, Divi, Elementor and Beaver Builder.
Admirably, it’s also user-friendly and comes with multiple gallery styles, each with customization options you can capitalize on to create personality.
Key features:
- Intuitive drag-and-drop builder
- Lightweight to ensure fast loading times
- Fully responsive design
- Social sharing buttons are available
Best WordPress photo gallery plugin for: eCommerce store owners looking to showcase products via photo galleries.
Price: Free. Each premium extension costs $19. Alternatively, you can buy all the extensions as a bundle for $49.
8. Meow Gallery
Meow Gallery is a light and fast gallery plugin built primarily with photographers in mind.
One of its standout features is its non-intrusive nature — you can easily switch back and forth between the default WordPress gallery and the Meow gallery.
It features seven distinct gallery layouts, including tiles, masonry, square, justified, map, cascade and carousel. Most of these layouts are available in the free version of the plugin; the carousel and map styles require access via a premium subscription.
The plugin’s code is optimized to ensure fast load times.
Key features:
- Gutenberg ready
- Seven distinct and engaging gallery layouts
- Easily switch between the plugin and the native gallery
- Optimized code to ensure fast performance
Best WordPress photo gallery plugin for: Professional and hobby photographers.
Price: Free with limited features. Premium plans start at $19 per year.
9. Robo Gallery
Robo Gallery offers an attractive combination of simplicity, functionality and cost-effectiveness.
The plugin provides various gallery layout styles and effects to match your website design and branding. There are 150 different configurations to modify your galleries.
The Robo Gallery plugin integrates with popular page builders like Gutenberg, Elementor and Beaver Builder so you can create and edit galleries within familiar environments.
You’ll also be able to embed videos from several sources, as this plugin features video support.
Key features:
- Support for popular page builders
- Numerous gallery layout options
- Up to 150 different gallery design configuration options
- Support for video galleries
Best WordPress photo gallery plugin for: eCommerce store owners and bloggers.
Price: Free with limited features. Premiums plans start at a one-time payment of $30.
Final thoughts: The best WordPress photo gallery plugins in 2024
A WordPress photo gallery plugin will help you showcase images on your website more effectively, according to your unique goals and aesthetic.
The nine plugins reviewed above are all solid options. Carefully compare each to see which is a good fit for your needs and budget.
When you make your choice, make sure you have reliable hosting backing up your
WordPress website so it performs exceptionally.
The powerful hosting infrastructure complements your photo gallery plugin to ensure a smooth user experience for visitors, so your images can make a real impact.
Since your website is unique, Bluehost has specialized WordPress hosting plans you can customize to boost your website’s performance.
