Several WordPress versions ago, putting together an image gallery wasn’t the easiest thing to do, let alone a gallery of videos or products for sale.
Today, however, there are many WordPress gallery plugins that are creative, powerful, and highly configurable. Sure, the Jetpack gallery is great in comparison to the early days of WordPress, but it pales in comparison to what’s available to designers and developers today.
You’ll see what I mean with these 20 useful WordPress gallery plugins on Envato Market.
So you’re looking for a WordPress gallery plugin that will do just about anything for you?
Well then you might want to start by taking a look at the Justified Image Grid – Premium WordPress Gallery.
Like any good WordPress gallery plugin, this one lets you set up your gallery configuration and drop in your shortcode.
This robust gallery plugin includes:
- 20 presets and 340 settings
- configure and change settings on a per-gallery basis
- load images from Facebook or Flickr, or manage your images via NextGEN
- tie into RSS feeds, pull videos from YouTube or Vimeo, or images from 500px, Pinterest, deviantART, StumbleUpon, Imgur, Tumblr, and others
- and so much more
When you peel back the layers further and find you can integrate recent posts, leverage CDN, and see all the different configuration options, this pushes the boundaries of being just a gallery plugin.
Justified Image Grid – Premium WordPress Gallery is more than just a gallery. It’s so much more.
Grids are great, but grids that can be designed to fit your style are even better.
The Essential Grid WordPress Plugin makes it easy to design the perfect grid-based gallery for your WordPress site.
Use one of the over 30 included skins or build your own with the easy-to-use drag-and-drop Visual Skin Editor.
This is one plugin with a lot of possibilities:
- WooCommerce support
- multisite and multilingual ready
- supports YouTube, Vimeo, and SoundCloud
- import and export your grid, skin, and metadata
- and more
This plugin focuses on making it easy to design your gallery however you like, and that’s exactly what it does.
The Essential Grid WordPress Plugin Visual Skin Editor makes it easy to build the perfect gallery for your blog, online store, portfolio, and much, much more.
Grid-based galleries are a great way to display images, videos, and more.
With a nice mix of options and features, you’ll be building your own grid galleries easily with the Media Grid – WordPress Responsive Portfolio plugin.
While you visually build your gallery with drag-and-drop tools, this all-in-one WordPress gallery plugin will generate a fully responsive grid-based gallery using advanced CSS and jQuery.
Features include:
- retina icons
- SEO pagination
- real-time search system
- unlimited responsive layouts
- and more
The SEO and search features really help set the Media Grid – WordPress Responsive Portfolio plugin apart from the others.
And with image, audio, video, and WooCommerce support, it can handle just about anything you throw its way.
Normally when you think about WordPress gallery plugins, you think about images.
And while some of these plugins offer support for both images and videos, the Video Gallery WordPress Plugin /w YouTube, Vimeo focuses on video.
This plugin does support images and audio, but video is where this plugin shines.
You’ll find it includes:
- subtitles support and touch enabled
- play from “last” or set a specific time
- connects with YouTube API and Vimeo API
- supports self-hosted files and MPEG-Dash live streaming
- and more
Fully responsive and retina ready, this plugin ensures that your video galleries will always look their best, no matter what device they are being viewed from.
The Video Gallery WordPress Plugin /w YouTube, Vimeo will have you delivering your video galleries quickly, easily, and with a whole lot of style.
The Go Portfolio – WordPress Responsive Portfolio will have your beautifully designed gallery up and running in no time.
While this plugin is really easy to use, it does so without being limited—it is very flexible.
This WordPress gallery plugin takes a slightly different approach than some others do. As with other solutions, you can create galleries and drop them in your posts and pages. The nice thing about this plugin, however, is that you can choose to create new custom post types.
Other features included are:
- works with any WordPress theme
- responsive grid or horizontal slider layout
- supports many image types, video providers, audio sources, and WooCommerce
- works with any post type (including custom types) and you can create an unlimited number of custom post types
- and more
If you’re not sure where to start, it includes 38 starter templates. And once you have finished your design, you can use the advanced export and import option.
The Go Portfolio – WordPress Responsive Portfolio delivers in every area.
Grid-based WordPress gallery plugins are all the rage, so where’s a full-featured gallery plugin that takes a slider-styled approach?
The Thumbnail Gallery (WordPress Plugin) is what you’re looking for.
Easily add images, YouTube and Vimeo videos, as well as HTML or Flash.
Features include:
- drag and drop to sort images
- AddThis social sharing integration
- change the position of the thumbnails
- navigate galleries using thumbnails or arrows
- and more
You can use the shortcode generator to build and insert your gallery, but the gallery settings are saved if you want to reuse settings from another gallery.
The Thumbnail Gallery (WordPress Plugin) includes a nice set of features in this no-nonsense WordPress gallery plugin.
The Fancy Gallery – WordPress Plugin is… well… fancy.
You can build beautiful galleries to be displayed in posts, pages, widgets, and even on external websites.
Using the HTML Generator, you can use galleries hosted by this WordPress gallery plugin on external websites. This is certainly a unique feature among the many more useful features:
- includes three widget types
- works with NextGEN and the shortcode
- thousands of layouts and hover effects variations
- easily create galleries by dropping images into a folder
- and more
As you can see, creating a fancy gallery is easy with the Fancy Gallery – WordPress Plugin.
Most of the WordPress gallery plugins place the design tools in the hands of the WordPress admin and allow them to design their galleries how they see fit.
That’s not the case with the uSquare – Universal Responsive WordPress Grid plugin.
This limitation, however, isn’t the plugin’s weakness—it’s uSquare’s strength.
Even though the relative design and style remain much the same, they can be used in many different ways.
And this plugin isn’t short on features or options:
- easing effects
- change order with drag and drop
- custom width and height of items
- custom Google Fonts (600+) and social icons
- and more
uSquare – Universal Responsive WordPress Grid for Team Members, Logos, Portfolio, Products and More is a unique and well-designed WordPress gallery plugin.
Usually WordPress gallery plugins provide general gallery options to design and style as you like, while others lock in the style or focus on one particular plugin gallery niche.
The Social Gallery WordPress Photo Viewer Plugin successfully delivers both.
This plugin transforms your lightbox into the ultimate social media sharing tool. In similar Facebook style, users can like, share, comment and more.
It’s pretty impressive.
Other features include:
- NextGEN compatible
- detects faces in images
- Google AdSense compatible
- over 40 CSS3 animation options
- and much, much more
You can integrate Disqus and Facebook comments, all the while adding your own branding.
The SEO-friendly Social Gallery WordPress Photo Viewer Plugin is impressive all on its own—but the social media focused lightbox takes it to a whole new level.
PhotoMosaic for WordPress is a great option for photographers and designers looking to showcase their work.
You can make several different adjustments to your mosaics, displaying your images beautifully within WordPress.
Some of the features are:
- lazy loading
- CSS3 loading animations
- image link behavior options
- shortcode and Template Tag support
- and more
Quickly and easily build your mosaic gallery. PhotoMosaic for WordPress galleries can be made from a list of images, images attached to your post or page, and from categories and tags from any taxonomy.
WordPress gallery plugins are pretty straightforward.
You add the images or embed the video and you have your gallery. Simple stuff.
But the Real 3D FlipBook – WordPress Plugin really gets you thinking outside the usual application.
Transform your images or PDF (yes, I said “PDF”) into a 3D book that can be navigated by flipping pages.
Using WebGL and a CSS3D fallback, you can create realistic-looking books, magazines, and brochures.
Features include:
- smart page loading
- customize page flip animations
- 3 skins included, fully customizable via CSS
- zoom in and out with mouse wheel or pinch on mobile
- and more
Retina friendly and responsive, your onscreen books even support deep linking and customizable table of contents.
The most impressive feature of the Real 3D FlipBook – WordPress Plugin has to be its use of PDF.js as this gallery plugin can even transform a PDF into an amazing, interactive browser experience.
Most gallery plugins break out on their own with custom shortcodes and upload interfaces.
The Global Gallery – WordPress Responsive Gallery, on the other hand, integrates nicely with both WordPress and NextGEN galleries.
With an image slider, image carousel, and gallery collections, this plugin has got you covered:
- deep-linked filters
- watermarking system
- drag-and-drop gallery builder
- 3 different gallery layouts and 8 lightboxes
- and more
Another impressive aspect of this plugin is the number of image sources you can pull from:
- Flickr
- 500px
- Tumblr
- Google+
- Dropbox
- RSS feeds
- WordPress
- Google Drive
- Facebook Pages
- and more
The Global Gallery – WordPress Responsive Gallery integrates well with WordPress galleries, while at the same time including its own impressive feature set.
Use the UberGrid – Responsive Grid Builder for WordPress plugin for some uber-cool grid galleries.
Posts or WooCommerce, this plugin is ready for action.
Fully responsive and customizable, this plugin is retina ready, has lots of lightbox options, and offers plenty of features:
- filtering
- pagination and deep linking
- includes widgets and fast CSS3 animation
- supports Google Fonts and JetpackPhoton
- and more
The most impressive feature is the ability to open grids in a lightbox, so you can actually use this on top of other galleries like PrettyPhoto, JetPack Gallery, FooBox and others.
The UberGrid – Responsive Grid Builder for WordPress has enough to stand out on its own, while making a nice lightbox addition to other gallery solutions.
Final Tiles Grid Gallery for WordPress is a pretty gallery plugin.
With YouTube, Vimeo, WooCommerce, SoundCloud, and WordPress image support, you’ll have a beautifully designed gallery up and running fast.
This plugin includes just about everything you’ll need:
- social sharing
- caption effects
- 7 different lightboxes
- customizable aspect ratios and filters
- and more
From the admin to your website gallery, Final Tiles Grid Gallery for WordPress is beautifully designed.
Galleries are great, but sometimes what you really need is something to change up your lightbox.
The iLightBox · Revolutionary Lightbox for WordPress truly revolutionizes the WordPress lightbox.
Using the jQuery JavaScript library and a user-friendly API, this plugin is the ultimate lightbox solution.
Features include:
- fully responsive
- 6 included skins
- supports YouTube and Vimeo
- shortcode parser for HTML content
- and more
Navigate your lightbox with a keyboard, mouse, or touchscreen, and use iLightBox · Revolutionary Lightbox for WordPress along with Jetpack, NextGEN, and standard WordPress gallery shortcode.
It’s pretty revolutionary.
The ZoomFolio – WordPress Portfolio Plugin does a great job at making gallery creation and customization easy.
Image galleries, portfolios or recent blog posts, this WordPress gallery plugin can handle it.
Install. Add content. Create your gallery.
It’s that simple.
But it’s not short on features:
- custom lightbox
- includes ten skins
- optimized for iOS and Android
- supports WooCommerce and YARPP (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin)
- and more
Using CSS3 technology for 3D effects (gracefully degrades when needed), the SEO-friendly ZoomFolio – WordPress Portfolio Plugin is a straightforward, easy-to-use WordPress gallery plugin.
This plugin has a lot of features seen in other WordPress gallery plugins, but blends them together in a unique way.
Grid FX – Responsive Grid Plugin for WordPress has a really nice feature set, making it feel a little more powerful than your typical gallery plugin.
Display blog posts, custom post types, and so much more.
This has an impressive feature set:
- pagination and more than 80 options
- custom effects and built-in views and Like system
- supports YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion and more
- mix WooCommerce, images, posts, videos and more in the same gallery
- and more
The built-in support for dropdown filtering and sorting is the most impressive feature aside from the built-in views and Like system. This gives users the ability to quickly and easily build a robust online store and more.
The Grid FX – Responsive Grid Plugin for WordPress is impressive.
I’ve got to say that once you begin to take a closer look at the Awesome Gallery WordPress plugin, it’s pretty awesome.
It’s not as flashy on many others, but the feature set and options are really solid.
- CDN support and automatic updates
- customize overlays, captions, filters, and more
- 10 preset styles, 3 layout modes, and 3 built-in lightboxes
- image sources include Flickr, Instagram, Facebook, WordPress posts, WooCommerce, 500px, and RSS feeds
- and more
The responsive and retina ready Awesome Gallery – Instagram, Flickr, Facebook Galleries on Your Site is a solid WordPress gallery plugin.
The Thumbnail Gallery (WP NextGEN Gallery Template) is the same as Thumbnail Gallery (WordPress Plugin).
The difference being, this plugin is designed to work as a NextGEN gallery template.
With over 100 customization options, there are plenty of features to catch your eye:
- touchscreen compatible
- display title and description
- AddThis social sharing integration
- and more
If you’re already using the WordPress NextGEN gallery, then Thumbnail Gallery (WP NextGEN Gallery Template) is worth a look.
Customize your gallery and lightbox as you build a grid-based gallery using images, videos, or HTML content.
The Wall/Grid Gallery (WordPress Plugin) offers everything you need to easily build and manage a grid-style gallery.
Features include:
- touchscreen support
- easy-to-use AJAX admin
- AddThis social sharing integration
- customize your gallery and lightbox
- and more
There’s nothing too fancy about the Wall/Grid Gallery (WordPress Plugin), which makes it highly configurable with over 60 different customization options.
A solid solution.
Conclusion
There are some WordPress gallery plugins in this roundup that have certainly caught my eye. While some of them excel with CSS3 effects, there were plenty that flexed their power on the back-end as well.
If you didn’t find exactly what you were looking for, perhaps an Envato Tuts+ WordPress tutorial, eBook, and course could get you started towards developing something new. Great tutorials like How to Use WordPress Without Hurting Performance or courses like WordPress Plugin Development Essentials are very helpful. Or maybe you could use some tips on configuring and customizing your new gallery with CSS? Try an ebook like Mastering CSS for Web Developers.
You can find more great WordPress gallery plugins on Envato Market.
Have you ever considered using a WordPress gallery plugin for more than just images?