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’ll be a simple and 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’ll find a dozen of different gallery plugins on the market. And each plugin may offer something unique like beautiful transitions, excellent user experience, image protection, gallery styles, and more.
In this article, we’ll share some of the best WordPress gallery plugins on the market. But before we do that, let’s have a quick look at how you should choose a gallery plugin in the first place.
How to Choose a WordPress Image Gallery Plugin?
As we mentioned, WordPress has a built-in image gallery and photo album feature, but the default gallery lacks the basic functionality like lightbox gallery, pagination, carousel, etc.
When choosing a WordPress gallery plugin, there are a few things you need to keep in mind.
- Advanced Features: Almost every gallery plugin comes with all the necessary features. But there are times when you’ll want to expand the core functionalities using addons or custom CSS. Before investing in a gallery plugin, it’s worth taking a moment to examine the features it provides and ask yourself if it can meet your needs.
- Ease of Use: Having a feature-rich plugin is excellent, but you need to find the right WordPress gallery plugin that adapts to your workflow and is easy to use at the same time. You also need to ensure your image gallery plugin supports the Gutenberg Block Editor as some of the WordPress themes may discontinue the old classic editor in the future.
- Speed: Images account for most of the downloaded bytes of 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 depends on your 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 releases of WordPress if it’s not updated regularly. When choosing a WordPress gallery plugin, you need to ensure it’s maintained and supported by a team you can rely upon.
- SEO Optimization: Anything that you add to your website should contribute to increasing your website 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.
Best Image Gallery WordPress Plugins
Below, you’ll find 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. Smash Balloon Instagram Feed
Instagram Feed Pro by Smash Balloon isn’t your regular photo gallery plugin. Still, it’s our first choice on this list because it’s a powerful tool that you can use to import images from Instagram and create beautiful photo galleries.
Once added to your site, all you have to do is connect your Instagram social media account. Then the plugin automatically fetches your Instagram feed and displays it in a neat gallery layout on your site.
You can completely customize the look of your feed. For instance, you can match your website’s theme and change the gallery layout to display as a carousel or popup 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 load times.
- No limitations: Display as many galleries as you want, either on the same page or throughout your site.
- Backup caching system: Ensures that your images will always display, even if there’s a problem with Instagram.
- Shoppable feeds: Create shoppable links for your images so that monetizing your site is easy. Users interested in buying a product can click on the link to go straight 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 configuring the plugin settings, it will continue to run on its own, grabbing fresh content from your Instagram social media account as you create new posts.
Smash Balloon Instagram Feed Pricing: There are four different pricing plans for Instagram Feed Pro.
- Personal – $49/year for 1 site
- Business – $99/year for 5 sites
- Developer – $149/year for 25 sites and priority support
- All Access Bundle – $299 for unlimited sites
The All Access Bundle plan comes with all Smash Balloon products, including Instagram Feed Pro, Custom Twitter Feeds Pro, Feeds for YouTube Pro, Custom Facebook Feed Pro, and Social Wall Pro.
And there’s also a lite version of the plugin available to download from the WordPress repository.
Get started with Smash Balloon Instagram Feed Pro today!
2. Envira Gallery
Envira Gallery is the best WordPress gallery plugin that’s 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 and feel of your gallery quickly.
Unlike other popular WordPress gallery plugins, Envira is lightweight and non-bloated. It comes with all the essential features out of the box. You can easily enhance the core functionalities by installing one of their two dozen addons.
Some of the key features of Envira Gallery are:
- Drag and drop builder: Create beautiful galleries in a matter of seconds with just a few clicks.
- Responsive and mobile-friendly: All galleries you build with Envira are 100% responsive and retina-ready, meaning they’ll work great on mobile, tablet, and desktop devices.
- Standalone galleries: Create independent galleries that are not tied to your posts and pages.
- Tons of addons: You can find an extensive collection of addons, like Social sharing, Videos, WooCommerce, Deeplinking, and Watermarking – just to name a few.
The Envira Gallery Deeplinking addon allows you to create independent links for all images in your gallery. You can also add password protection to your galleries and share the independent links with your users to access your WordPress gallery.
Envira Gallery has a built-in lazy loading feature that reduces the page load time. You can also add as many images to your gallery as you want, and it’ll add an infinite scroll on your page automatically.
Envira Gallery Pricing: A lite version of the Envira is available to download from the WordPress repository, which offers limited features.
Here are the four pricing plans for the premium version.
- Basic – $14/year for a single site license
- Plus – $34/year for 3 sites
- Pro – $49/year for 25 sites
- Lifetime – $359/year for unlimited sites
Get started with Envira Gallery today!
3. Modula
Modula is a beginner-friendly WordPress image gallery plugin. It lets you customize images in your website’s photo gallery, similar to a basic smartphone’s image gallery where you can easily crop, resize, or drag photos.
The plugin shows an instant preview of the changes you make to your gallery, so you don’t have to switch back and forth between your WordPress dashboard and gallery page builder.
Here are some of the key Modula features:
- Image gallery styles: You can create a grid gallery with Module and the best part is that it lets you resize 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 of 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 photos.
The free version of the Modula is available to download from the official WordPress.org directory, which comes with limited features. If you want complete plugin access, you’ll need to use the pro version.
Modula Pricing: It offers three different pricing plans.
- Starter: $39/year for a single site license
- Trio: $69/year for 3 sites
- Business: $99/year for 5 sites
Each of these plans offers priority support for one year, basic tutorials, password protection, advanced shortcode, right-click protection, and more.
Get started with Modula today!
4. FooGallery
FooGallery is one of the best image gallery plugins for WordPress. It lets you create beautiful responsive and retina-ready image galleries in just a few clicks.
With FooGallery, you can arrange your images the way you want by using its drag and drop reordering capability. It also allows you to choose a gallery template for your need, so you don’t always have to create an image gallery from the ground up.
Some of the plugin features include:
- Lazy loading photos: Reduce page load time by only loading images that are 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 thumbnails of your images to engage users in the first look.
- Advanced pagination: Multiple types of pagination to create image gallery carousel, lazy loading gallery, infinite scrolling gallery, and more.
It is a developer-friendly plugin and comes with dozens of hooks and filters so you can easily customize the plugin per your clients’ needs.
FooGallery Pricing: FooGallery offers four different pricing plans.
- Personal Free – Forever FREE
- Pro Starter – $19.99 per year
- Pro Expert – $59.99 per year
- Pro Commerce – $99.99 per year
The FooGallery free plugin is built for beginners, startups, and small businesses to create basic image galleries. The pricing plans are available on monthly, yearly, and lifetime payment terms.
Get started with FooGallery today!
5. NextGEN Gallery
NextGEN Gallery is one of the most popular WordPress gallery plugins. It comes with all the features you’ll ever need right out of the box to create professional website galleries.
The gallery plugin provides multiple ways to organize your images, batch upload images, import metadata from your photos, and group galleries into albums.
Check out these NextGEN gallery features:
- Photo proofing: Engage your customers from start to end to show them photos for proofing before you deliver the final images.
- Image protection: Disable the right-click and drag-to-download option from your galleries.
- Automated print fulfillment: Send print size files to clients directly without any additional plugin requirement.
- Mosaic and masonry gallery: Beautiful gallery layouts to create custom grid and flexible galleries.
After uploading your images to your WordPress site, you can group them to create a slideshow or a thumbnail gallery. The 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 display styles and two album styles. On the other hand, the pro version includes premium gallery displays, a pro lightbox display with image comments, and social sharing.
NextGen Gallery Pricing: It offers four premium pricing plans:
- Starter – $18 per year for 1 site
- Plus – $60 per year for 3 sites
- Pro – $84 per year for 5 sites
- Lifetime – $384 per year for unlimited sites
The pro and the lifetime plans also give you access to all Imagely themes for free.
Get started with NextGEN Gallery today!
6. WP Photo Album Plus
WP Photo Album Plus is a powerful and free WordPress photo gallery plugin. It lets users rate or comment on photos in your image gallery.
The plugin setup isn’t as straightforward compared to other WordPress gallery plugins. However, it comes with more customization options than most other free image gallery plugins on the market.
The unique features of the plugin include:
- Custom widgets: Add slideshow, photo of the day, and top-rated photos using custom widgets.
- Frontend uploads: Allow your customers to upload images from your website and you can accept or decline the photos.
- Bulk imports: Import images to create photo albums from your computer or cloud storage.
- Photo rating: Your website users can rate and review photos on the image gallery.
With WP Photo Album Plus, you get complete control over the metadata, such as EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) and the display sizes. It has loads of built-in options like a lightbox overlay system, Google Maps, and search functions.
WP Photo Album Plus Pricing: FREE
Get started with WP Photo Album Plus today!
7. Grand Flagallery
Grand Flagallery is a basic media and image gallery plugin for WordPress. It allows you to upload images quickly and create music and video playlists on your website.
The plugin comes with the ability to batch upload and organize your images. All your galleries can be managed in a centralized location to create and customize albums using image galleries.
Take a look at the key features of the Grand Flagallery plugin:
- Demo galleries: Use readymade galleries and replace images to get started right away.
- Gallery Manager: Customize gallery images, add title and description, reorder images, and more.
- Thumbnail management: Manage, crop, and resize individual thumbnails easily.
- Full window gallery template: Display image gallery in full separate pages.
Grand Flagallery is a user-friendly gallery plugin that offers the easiest way to add your image galleries in WordPress. You can download the free plugin from their website, but you’ll need to get the premium version to access all features.
Grand Flagallery Pricing: It offers a one-time payment of $20 to get lifetime access to their premium license. No renewals or additional fees for anything.
Get started with Grand Flagallery today!
8. Photo Gallery by 10Web
Photo Gallery is a fully-responsive WordPress gallery plugin that showcases interactive multimedia galleries. Within a single gallery, you can add both images and videos.
The Photo Gallery plugin comes with four easy-to-use widgets that blend into any WordPress theme to add tags, create slideshows, and more.
A few more features of the Photo Gallery plugin are:
- 10 view options: Display your image gallery in different views such as thumbnails, masonry, mosaic, slideshow, etc.
- Watermark: Protect your images with watermarking. You can add a text or image watermark and set its position and display the size.
- Ecommerce: Easily sell your images from your WordPress website with the eCommerce addon.
- Gallery groups and tags: Seamlessly organize your image galleries into groups. And, add tags to filter galleries the right way.
You also have great options for customizing your image gallery. It offers video support, email support, live chat support, and access to updates for up to six months after the signup.
Photo Gallery by 10Web Pricing: The free Photo Gallery plugin is available on the WordPress repository. It also comes with three paid plans.
- Basic – $30 per year for 1 site
- Pro – $60 per year for 5 sites
- Plugins Bundle – $100 per year for 30 sites
Get started with Photo Gallery today!
9. Gmedia Gallery
Gmedia Gallery is another fantastic WordPress image gallery plugin. It lets you create a responsive image and video albums that perfectly adapt to your visitors’ screens, regardless of their resolution.
You can use the powerful mobile app to create galleries and upload images, videos, and other media files to your WordPress pages/posts directly.
Some of the key features of Gmedia Gallery are:
- Exif info: Display EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) data including camera model, aperture, etc.
- Supports video and audio: Gmedia lets you easily embed video and audio files from YouTube, Vimeo, and custom videos.
- iOS application: Using the Gmedia iOS app, you can easily upload images, videos, and other files directly to your WordPress admin without hassle.
- WordPress comments integration: Allow your users to post comments on video galleries.
Gmedia is one of the most accessible plugins to use. The best part is that the more websites you’ll install the plugin, the less price you’ll have to pay on new licenses.
Gmedia Gallery Pricing: Here’s the pricing breakdown for Gmedia Gallery:
- 1 website – $29.99 per license
- 2-5 websites – $20 per license
- 6-9 websites – $15 per license
- 10-19 websites – $10 per license
- 20-49 websites – $8.5 per license
- 50+ websites – Get a quote!
Get started with Gmedia Gallery today!
That’s our list of the best gallery plugins for WordPress. Up next, we’ll give you our top 3 picks from this list.
Conclusion: Which is the Best WordPress Gallery Plugin?
Through our comparison, we’ve found that Smash Balloon Instagram Feed and Envira Gallery are the best WordPress image gallery plugins.
Smash Balloon is the #1 WordPress gallery plugin to import images from Instagram and create galleries automatically. It has additional features like popup media lightbox, video carousels, user comments, image optimization, etc.
Envira Gallery comes with all the necessary features you can expect from a gallery plugin, yet its user interface is easy to use and doesn’t look bloated. It also comes with over two dozen different addons ranging from eCommerce, proofing, lightroom integration, social sharing, and more.
Modula is also a great choice when it comes to page load time and speed. It’s well code and highly optimized for performance.
That’s all we have for you. We hope this article has helped you find the best WordPress gallery plugin that fits your website’s needs.
Moving forward, you should also check out some of our popular guides:
- How to Create an Image Gallery in WordPress (With & Without a Plugin)
- 6 Best Image Optimization Plugins for WordPress (Compared)
- 8 Best WordPress YouTube Video Gallery Plugins
In the tutorial, we show you the best way to create an image gallery with and without a plugin. The next 2 posts will help you optimize your images and create video galleries from your YouTube channels to enhance user experience.
Hello,
Go Gallery may be good addition to this list as well.
Cheers!
Hello, I’m the author of Gmedia Gallery plugin and Flagallery plugin. Thanks for adding my plugin to your Best WordPress Gallery plugins list. There is another one gallery plugin created by me recently called WoowGallery which is super user friendly and multifunctional and have a lot of free features which are usually premium in other gallery plugins. I’ll be very thankful if you take a look at WoowGallery plugin when you have a time.
I wish there was a way to find out certain features of a plugin. I’m an artist, so I am new to the verbiage for website building, so searching for certain features gets me nowhere. I need a gallery/album that will allow my visitors to look at, choose and then download the images I want them to have. I work with members of the Paintshop Pro communities, offering my art for them to use free of charge. I need for them to be able to get to my site, click a link to my directory and then peruse the different categories, choose and then download what they need. The tech at Siteground said I need a plugin for that to happen and gave me this link. I am using the WordPress 5 (Gutenberg Block). The only plugin suggested here that says it has an add on for one click downloads is the Envira, I need something plain, simple, out of the box easy. I am new to building my website.
Marilyn
Hello,
I’m using Go Gallery on my site and it works quite well. I just want to add some more features to it but I don’t know how I can do this. Any help will be appreciated.
Thanks!
which plugin has included maps/folders to drag your galleries into? I want on my website 1 page with multiple maps/folders in which i can put multiple galleries. I know Envira has them, but you need to buy the upgrade. Is there a plug in which has these maps for free?
Just want to share..
I have used this wordpress plugin called “Innozilla Image Gallery 8” and its really simple to use and very lightweight. 😀
Just want to share
cause i have recently downloaded this plugin called “Innozilla Image Gallery 8” and it really have a great effect on my website.
Have also a look at Final Tiles Gallery, it’s quite common (30,000+ active installations!)
Great list and no doubt all the plugins are really great.
But I feel WP-UPG (User Post Gallery) wordpress plugin to be the best fit.
As I can let my visitors to submit image and can display it in many available layouts.
The best part is, I can build my own styled gallery using their layout editor. 🙂
which gallery should i choose if i want to be able to upload pictures from the blog and not have to go into the control panel.
Envira Gallery helps you do that.
Nice post! Thanks for sharing amazing content.
HI, please check unite gallery lite. it has 10 gallery types and it’s best for mobile.
Hey ! Might be a biased comment as I’m one of the developers, but I think the the Meow Gallery plugin is a pretty solid plugin, especially with Gutenberg.
You might want to have a look !
Cheers 🙂
Thanks for the heads up, Thomas!
Hi Shahzad,
Nice list by the way but I would rather add GrandWP Gallery to this list as well.
Check it out you will like it!
Thanks for the addition, Pledger!
I have no idea how or why WP Modula was excluded from this list!
Looks like WP Modula would be a great addition to the list. Thanks for stopping by.
Hi there, I noticed it’s still not on the list. How come? 🙁