My Favorite Image Gallery Plugins

Image gallery plugins with lightbox (slideshow) options can be hard to select.Some options for the native WordPress gallery are presented below.

Two favored WordPress image gallery plugins are:

• Nextgen / Nextgen Pro ($97) – click here.
• Photo Gallery / Photo Gallery Pro ($30-$60) – sales page – see demo links at top of page –

What I like about these image galleries is that (1) images are easy to upload, and (2) the slideshows automatically preserve the dimensions of the images.

Unfortunately, neither seems to allow title captions on masonry layouts (although see the jQuery Masonry Image Gallery, described below).

The two plugins have similar options, available mostly in the Pro version. Here’s the Photo Gallery options (and Nextgen’s are similar). Photo Gallery options may be more extensive and easier to implement. I do like Nextgen styling, however!

For native WordPress Gallery options, the Tiled Galleries Without Jetpack plugin has some nice options for rectangular and square mosaic, and circular grid layouts (Settings > Media menu, with drop-down style selections in the gallery popup window). It does not display titles in the gallery, but it does display them in the lightbox, and the lightbox is quite nice.

The Jetpack plugin Tiled Galleries option generates a nice masonry layout of the native WordPress gallery (select Tiled Columns in the gallery options) (this is not an option in either Nextgen or Photo Gallery, above!, and when combined with the Jetpack Carousel option, also provides a nice lightbox.

Formerly I used jQuery Masonry Image Gallery, but this plugin has been deprecated, and the EWSEL Lightbox for Galleries, which has a number of theme stylings (Settings > EWSEL …). Also see Image Gallery by Huge-it, WP Featherlight – A Simple Jquery Lightbox, and the Responsive Lightbox by dFactory (the latter may not work on SSL secure sites).