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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.
I need a CMS that allow me to interact with people anonymousely… The site will present some video, some picture… but i need to :
Let ANYBODY without registering send video, post and picture. those media will fall into a queue for approval by real persont that manage the site, and send that to the right category !
So if you know plugin or extension for joomla, drupal or wordpress that do that or another cms that will allow the flexibility to do that…
Dont tell me it’s dangerous to let anybody upload photo, i can get porn, but it will be filter by human, and registering under false name do the same thing
I’m going to give NextGen a try on the photography portion of my site. The theme I installed didn’t come with a default.
Is jQuery Image Lazy Loader WP compatible with wordpress 3.0? used it but no effect…
[...] 1stwebdesigner.com [...]
thanks for this! That lazy loader really cool! ;)
I have tried a couple of these, but didn’t seem to do exactly what I would like, which is…
Display an image in my sidebar that is tag-related to the post. Ability to tag images and have them appear in the sidebar based on the tags of the respective post.
Any ideas?
-Scott
Hi Scott! I think your need is too specific and there will not be such plugin – I know such images are handled by WP Custom fields and you could find somewhere theme supporting this features and just include it in your own site.
If not I think you should head out to forums and just ask there it to more experienced people :)
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[...] 20 WordPress Plugins For Better Image Handling [...]
[...] 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 [...]
[...] 20 WordPress plugins for better image handling Una raccolta di plugin per una miglior gestione delle immagini sul nostro blog. [...]
nice post ..will try some of image plugins
.-= Tech help´s last blog ..Download Free EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard Worth $69.95 =-.
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[...] 20 WordPress Plugin Solutions for Image Handling | Graphic and Web Design Blog -Resources And Tutori… "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!" (tags: wordpressplugins) [...]
Hello, very interesting post. I found an easier way to integrate gallery into my Wordpress. Named GRAND Flash Album Gallery – multi category flash skin based photo gallery with powerful admin. I used it in my blog. There are so many different settings. You can adjust the color scheme for your blog as you wish. There are many different skins. You can present your photo gallery in a wonderful way, there is a full-screen mode. This is a very cool plugin.
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Trying freebie images looks good
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[...] 20 WordPress Plugin Solutions for Image Handling [...]
Nice list, thanks :)
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Don’t forget the excelent PhotoQ for photobloging with Wordpress.
Find it here : http://www.whoismanu.com/photoq-wordpress-photoblog-plugin/
.-= Mister Wordpress´s last blog ..Présentation de Wordpress 3.0 =-.
Thank you so much! This was a great post and exactly the options/suggestions I was looking for today!
[...] 20 WordPress Plugin Solutions for Image Handling | Graphic and Web … [...]
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Images and photos are an integral part of almost every successful blog these days. If your text isnt accompanied by images, few people are going to be interested in what youve got to say- its sad, but true….
[...] Continue reading here: 20 WordPress Plugins For Better Image Handling [...]
Great collection of plugins. But just a thought, don’t they cause heavy load on a blog server?
.-= dimaks´s last blog ..Oldest Known Temple in the World Discovered in Turkey =-.
Don’t install them all. Just install those which you want.:)
I just changed my theme to have thumb pics, that was a lot of work but well worth it.
.-= video games´s last blog ..Aliens Vs Predator: You have my Sympathies Achievement Guide =-.
Great collection. I’ve used some of the plugins myself. Although there are a few I have to try yet. Thanks!
.-= tiara ´s last blog ..How to Generate a CSR in Cpanel/WHM =-.
We can also use the plugins to optimise the SEO in images for example “SEO Friendly Images” which “Automatically adds alt and title attributes to all your images. Improves traffic from search results and makes them W3C/xHTML valid as well.” http://www.im-web-gefunden.de/wordpress-plugins/role-manager/
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[...] 20 WordPress Plugin Solutions for Image Handling | Graphic and Web Design Blog -Resources And Tutori… 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! [...]
[...] 20 WordPress Plugin Solutions for Image Handling [...]
WOW! So many choices! But I have one question — has anyone experienced any problem with their WP site after one of these plugins was enabled? Had problems in the past with a number of plugins — would love a “heads up” if you’ve had a bad experience with one of these. Thanks.
.-= tish´s last blog ..A Photo Artist Who Finds Beauty in the Rubble =-.
I love the image slideshows they have now and the fact that they’re available with the free themes–makes nice site design and features affordable…I’ll be sure to check out these others :)
.-= Melody´s last blog ..Twinup Of The Month: Twittercrush, February 10′ =-.
Cool! Exactly what I need.
Thanks for the plugins . . You saved me lots of time
Of all the plugins listed here, I’ve tried most. But the one I’m particularly fond of is ‘Thumbnail For Excerpts’. It works right out of the box, and makes your blog instantly more attractive. I use excerpts on my main page as well as archives. Excerpts make things look more concise, while the image still make it easily scanable.
On thing I did notice is that the last version seems to be a little bugged. The creator writes that the plugins search for a thumb first. However, in some case I’ve noticed it does not pick the thumb and just scales the original image. This leads to bad performance, which I dislike.
Of all the plugins I haven’t used, I think I’m going to give Lazyload (#1) a try.
.-= Stijn Vogels´s last blog ..Bob Dylan: The Times They Are A-Changin’ =-.
To be honest, I find it strange you guys aren’t using Lazy Load. Seems to work right out of the box. If it can work for sites like Mashable, it should be pretty good on 1stwebdesigner dot com as well, don’t you agree?
.-= Stijn´s last blog ..Bob Dylan: The Times They Are A-Changin’ =-.
Agreed. Actually we are modifying it according to our needs. Soon you will see it active here on 1WD.:)
Love the feedback. Thanks for taking your time to reply to my comment. I’m looking forward to seeing how your development turns out. Be sure to make a study of performance before and after. Could make a huge impact on general web performance, if the JS can be made more compact.
.-= Stijn´s last blog ..Bob Dylan: The Times They Are A-Changin’ =-.
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Super collection! VSlider is another great plugin for slide shows, exactly put it in the list. ;)
.-= Social Icon Sets´s last blog ..ShopperPress – Wordpress Shopping Cart Plugin Review =-.
Don’t forget: http://www.vibethemes.com/wordpress-plugins/vslider-wordpress-image-slider-plugin/
Works really well and is super easy to setup.
oh, thank you for great share :) will add!