20 WordPress Plugins For Better Image Handling
Tom Walker
Images and photos are an integral part of almost every successful blog these days. If your text isn’t accompanied by images, few people are going to be interested in what you’ve got to say- it’s sad, but true. The problem is, with so many people uploading images to their blogs in interesting and unique ways, it’s hard to make your blog stand out unless you’re doing the same.
WordPress doesn’t make it easy for you to engage your readers with images. You’re going to have to look beyond core to the hundreds of image/photo based plugins available to make your blog highly visual. Below, you’ll find a score of solutions to all your image/photo problems in the form of the best plugins around. There are lazy loaders, gallery creators, slideshow generators, photoblog initiators and much, much more. You’ll soon realize that there’s more to WordPress than a few lousy thumbnails!
1. jQuery Image Lazy Loader WP
Lazy Loader is the perfect plugin for those who want to upload lots of images to their blog, but maintain a snappy site. Rather than loading all of the images on a page at once, which can take a considerable amount of time, Lazy Loader loads the images at the top of each page first and continues to load images further down as the user scrolls downwards.
2. Frontpage-Slideshow
This plugin does exactly what its name suggests: it lets you create a professional slideshow on the front page of your WordPress blog. Each picture is clickable, leading you to its related post, and information about four different slides can be displayed at a time. Transitions between slides are faded to look extra sleek.
3. NextGEN Gallery
NextGEN is without question the best WordPress gallery plugin available and you should certainly try it out if you haven’t already. It’s comprehensive, with an easily understandable back-end. The only problem is that everyone’s using it. It does pretty much everything you’d want from a gallery plugin, looks professional and comes with a Flash slideshow option.
4. WP Photo Album
Unlike most of the plugins in this list, which focus more on user experience, WP Photo Album is made specifically for the blogger him- or herself. It makes creating and managing your photo albums easy, letting you move images between albums and adjust the sizes of thumbnails and full view pictures.
5. Flickr Photo Album
If you regularly upload photos to Flickr before transferring them to your WordPress blog, this plugin’s going to make your life a whole lot easier. You simply select Flickr photosets and display them on your blog as galleries, which you can customize to suit the look and feel of your site. It comes with a great widget which lets you display your latest Flickr photos in your blog’s sidebar.
6. FlippingBook
Use FlippingBook to add an extra element of interactivity to your blog and fully engage your visitors. Rather than displaying images in the standard way (a la NextGEN), FlippingBook displays them in Flash books, which can be flipped through with ease and great enjoyment. You can create these “books” in the administrator panel.
7. Cincopa: Post Videos and Photo Galleries
When it comes to displaying images, Cincopa does it all, creating polished image galleries and slideshows, not to mention videos, playlists and podcasts. It gives you access to 44 different skins to be sure that all Cincopa blogs retain a degree of individuality.
8. Lightbox2
Lightbox2 is simple, but devastatingly effective. Like all lightbox-type plugins, it lets you enlarge and overlay images on the current page, while dimming what’s left in the background. Unique to Lightbox2 is the ability to group related images and use numerous visual effects.
9. WordPress Content Slide
Use WordPress Content Slide to create jQuery slideshows anywhere within your WordPress blog. These slideshows fade in and out to add a touch of class to your site. Content Slide is fully customizable, even letting you link to another website if you like, to use the slideshow as an advertising banner.
10. Yet Another Photoblog
Far more interesting than its name suggests, Yet Another Photoblog (YAPB) is perfect for those who upload more images than text. It’s not a gallery plugin; it only lets you upload one image per post with a description. Using the YAPB Bulk Uploader plugin, you can mass upload images to your YAPB blog in an instant.
11. Lazyest Gallery
Lazyest Gallery is a powerful plugin with lots of great features. It rotates random images from your gallery, fading each one in and out. It’s fully customizable from the back end, letting you select the number of random images shown, portrait/landscape or both and various fading settings. It also allows comments on images and folders.
12. Shadowbox JS
Shadowbox is not only a great way to display images on your WordPress blog, it’s ideal for sharing videos too. Never again will you have to guide visitors away from your blog for them to view media as all images, audio files and videos, including YouTube videos will play directly on your site.
13. Sidebar Photoblog
14. Thumbnail For Excerpts
With this simple plugin, you can add thumbnail images to any excerpts you might have on your site, making it instantly more attractive and easier to navigate, improving usability and visitor experience.
15. Flickr Gallery
There are several plugins available which make uploading your photos from Flickr to WordPress easy, but this is one of the best. It lets you quickly create galleries of your most recent and most popular Flickr photos, view photos in gallery mode without leaving the page, display small images automatically in lightbox mode and embed Flickr’s Flash movie player.
16. Featured Content Gallery
Featured Content Gallery can transform your humble blog into a professional looking portfolio site. Besides other things, it creates a rotating image gallery of your posts or pages, which you can place anywhere on your blog. Each image can be overlaid with an extract from the text too.
17. Freebie Images
If stock images play a significant part in your professional (or personal) life, Freebie Images comes highly recommended. Search through a directory of thousands of regularly updated, free stock images which you can drag and drop into your posts.
18. Dynamic Content Gallery
Dynamic Content Gallery generates an image gallery with a shot for each of your latest or featured posts and pages (although default images can be added too.) What makes this plugin stand out from the rest is the slick look of the gallery itself.
19. SlideZoom
SlideZoom prides itself on its simplicity and quite rightly so. It’s particularly lightweight and straightforward. It lets you bulk or zip upload images to your blog, generating a HighSlide JS gallery that you can embed in WordPress or anywhere else you like, such as on another blog, eBay or a forum.
20. DM Albums
DM albums presents your photos in a really distinctive way, enlarging all images to perfectly fit the size of your blog, rather than showing them in a window half the size of your screen. You can add captions to individual photos and albums from within the WordPress Editor.
Let us know if we forgot some great plugin. We would love to hear your thoughts.
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Amit Shaw
Posted 10 days ago 81Super Article. Thanks Thank you so much for sharing with us.
Debbie
Posted 17 days ago 80Hi, what a super article. Really useful information and list. I love finding sites like yours on the internet.
Thanks.
Debbie
Cartridge Discount
Posted 18 days ago 79Thnaks to posting this amazing WordPress plugins. I will install “Frontpage-Slideshow” on my blog.
Mind Prompter
Posted 21 days ago 78Ive Used Dynamic Content Gallery for my site cause it so simple to use… thank admin
Internet Marketing Cape Town
Posted 27 days ago 77Loved the post but had to ask if anyone came across a WP plugin that can take screenshots of anything on your desktop and add it to a post/page?
I’m wanting to avoid having to import images the normal way.
Perhaps this is an idea for a clever plugin developer out there?
Would love to know if anyone has seen anything similar.
Thanks
Raj
Posted 39 days ago 76what a huge collection of plugins!!!!! very helpful………….. nice to know. i will use some of these plugins on my web blog.
Seattle Homes
Posted 51 days ago 75Great post for images. I am trying to utilize Flickr with my website and this is going to help me out a lot.
Jon Knudsen
Posted 59 days ago 74Does any of the plug-ins support password protected pages?
Pinoy Blogger
Posted 59 days ago 73I’ve used Dynamic Content Gallery before and it great plugin for photo gallery…nice
Gerben
Posted 60 days ago 72Nice list! I’d like to add a plugin I’ve deloped. It’s coming out soon and it’s called Magic Gallery (http://www.magicgalleryplugin.com/) Check out the site for more info and demo’s.
bursa psikolog
Posted 62 days ago 71great list, i heard some of them but all of them are perfect
Rex
Posted 85 days ago 70One way to find the best plugins is to search for them. Fortunately, there is a search engine dedicated to the job.
The search engine at searchwordpressplugins.com let’s you filter by:
* minimum rating,
* a minimum number of ratings,
* a minimum number of downloads
* a date since when the plugin must have been updated.
* excluding any plugins that are reported as broken.
Trying different search combinations, it is amazing what gems pop out from those 17,000 plugins.
Rex
Steve Mills
Posted 86 days ago 69I am using a few of these on my site to simplify my livecasting activities with photos
Bobo
Posted 90 days ago 68Hey Guys!
Just ran across you site that has NOT DATES ANYWHERE ON ANY OF THE CONTENT.
Since there’s no way to contextualize your software links, I guess this whole site is Spam and should be ignored.
Thanks for nothing!
Vipul
Posted 99 days ago 67from ur page i started using this pluign on my site,
Joe Gee
Posted 115 days ago 66Thanks for this article. I wish the screenshots would show you what the plugins look like but i think i found what i need :) I have been using nextgen and the built in viewer in my photocrati theme :)
web page designer
Posted 127 days ago 65Hey Tom,
Though you do have a few links that need repairing (someone hoodwinked the original URL you linked to), I STILL found several NEW goodies with which to choose from. WOW! …was all I could say while checking out all of these plugins.
Thanks,
Trish
The Nerdy Nurse
Posted 128 days ago 64always enjoy learning about new wordpress plugins!
Thank you for this useful list. Like the stoke image one the best.
Another gallery
Posted 142 days ago 63Here’s another WordPress photo plugin, but it’a on flash
http://1plugin.com
Adam Haworth
Posted 145 days ago 62NextGEN Gallery has been the best by far for me, I use it with a java plugin and modifications to achieve really good results.
It takes a bit of tweeking wit CSS to get it to sit right but apart from that its brillaint.
Steve
Posted 155 days ago 61Thanks for the article, I have installed Next Gen gallery and it works great. Would recommend it.
Vanessa V
Posted 157 days ago 60Have you got Freebie Images to work? Whenever I perform a search with it, I get zero results. And it looks as though nobody at crestock.com is replying to comments in their page about it.