Image Gallery Plugin Recommendation
As a follow up to my previous post WordPress Image Gallery Gotchas I thought I’d let you know what image gallery software I’m currently using. As you may recall, I tried combining Gallery2 (a full featured open source image gallery) with WPG2 (a WordPress plugin to place Gallery2 inside your blog) but I didn’t have much success so I began reconsidering my options.
I went to the WordPress Plugins page, then went to the Images Plugins section and browsed through all their offerings. Here’s my list of top contenders and my impression of each one:
- Lightbox JS [DEMO] : Fairly simple, didn’t see any gallery management features and the effect took a while to load on demo page.
- Inline Gallery [DEMO] : It’s quick, simple and basic, perhaps a little too basic, no thumbnail gallery display.
- NextGEN Gallery [DEMO] : The demo pages look good, has paged navigation, image management features (captioning etc.), presentation options various JS effects or SWF, middle click bypasses JS and opens in new window.
- PictPress [DEMO] : Link at WordPress.org is wrong, should go to the PictPress main page, nice solution integrates well with WordPress, no slide show, been in “beta” over a year but looks pretty solid.
- AWSOM Pixgallery [DEMO] : Integrates well with the blog, sort of odd that thumbnails open images in new blog page, then clicking image in blog page pops up a JS/AJAX image window, allows captioning of images in gallery.
- WP Highslide [DEMO] : Pretty slick, images expand in place, no gallery management features.
After a fair amount of consideration I decided NextGEN would be my “next” image gallery of choice. It does nearly all I want right out of the box plus a little more. It’s still being actively developed and judging by the download numbers at WordPress.org it appears to have a rather large user base as well. The variety of options provided for getting images into your gallery (FTP, ZIP file, etc.) and the plentiful yet refined administration panels make working with galleries a breeze. You can view my recent Tendril Gallery to see the results.
No one gallery can meet everyone’s needs, hopefully this post will help you make a more informed decision.
Comments(20)
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[…] it is crap). Luckily, there are several plugins available which are able to create galleries. PixelWit has a review of most of them, and the final recommendation is the one I […]
Thanks for a great post. Useful information. I used the first plugin
Nice list! Do you know which one works well with all browsers and can be uploaded by post and category?
This post was very helpful. Thank you. I was tired of looking in the WordPress repository.
NextGen is definitely the one. It’s been awhile since you posted this and I was wondering if there has been any better ones come through?