If you want to improve the design of your website, installing one of the best free WordPress gallery plugins could be the solution for you.
WordPress gallery plugins are a great addition to websites that rely on visual content such as pictures and videos.
You don’t have to spend a lot of money to use such plugins; plenty of free WordPress gallery plugins are available. You just have to choose the right one.
Hence, after reviewing several gallery plugins, we have compiled a list of the fourteen best free WordPress gallery plugins.
Make the Most of Visual Content
If your site relies on stunning images, pairing your galleries with simple, elegant forms can enhance user interaction. Everest Forms lets you effortlessly add contact or inquiry forms—helping visitors connect with you right where it matters.
To locate the ideal plugin for your requirements, continue reading!
Why Include Gallery Plugins on Your Site?
The main purpose of a good gallery plugin is to display your website’s images in a beautiful layout. However, there are a few other uses for gallery plugins:
- Improve Website Traffic: WordPress picture galleries can massively help increase the site’s traffic and visitor engagement with your content.
- Attractive Appearance: A gallery plugin helps systematically incorporate attractive pictures on a website.
- Manage Pictures and Images: WordPress image gallery plugins enable you to keep the images on your website organized.
- Sell Photos: Photographers and visual artists can also sell the pictures through a WordPress website with eCommerce-supported gallery plugins.
14 Best Free WordPress Gallery Plugins
Below is a list of remarkable plugins that stand out for their adaptability, ease of customization, and flawless integration. Let’s explore each and uncover what it offers.
1. NextGEN Gallery
NextGEN Gallery is one of the best free WordPress gallery plugins on the internet. It allows you to add a picture gallery to your WordPress website seamlessly.
Launched in 2007, it’s a heavy-duty plugin for professional photographers, visual artists, etc. So, if you manage thousands of pictures, it’s a hassle-free option for showcasing such images.
NextGEN enables you to display your work as a thumbnail gallery or slideshow in an Extended or Compact layout style.
You can create unlimited galleries. While doing so, you can edit thumbnails, add/remove/sort/rearrange photos, group galleries into albums, import metadata, and more.
Key Features
- Various stylish gallery layouts
- Dashboard with easy customization for the lightbox feature
- Integration with eCommerce platforms
- Compatible with popular WordPress themes
- Responsive on different screens, from desktops to tablets and mobile devices
2. Photo Gallery by 10Web
Another free WordPress image gallery plugin featured on our list is Photo Gallery by 10Web. It offers interactive multimedia galleries as well.
The plugin comes with a powerful lightbox to present your content. It supports Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube, etc., so you can include videos in the gallery.
Photo Gallery also lets you create individual galleries with either photos or videos. Similarly, you can add watermarks to your website’s images.
Furthermore, the plugin features an image slideshow with audio tracks to boost user experience.
Key Features
- Available with several add-ons
- Right-click protection for preventing image downloads
- Slick design with beautiful layouts
- Fully customizable gallery
- Features four different widgets, including Gallery and Slideshow widgets
3. Envira Photo Gallery
Envira is an easy-to-use WordPress gallery plugin that is free of cost and comes with a drag-a-drop builder feature and a well-designed interface.
This plugin is compatible with popular page builders like Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi, etc.
You can start uploading images from your device and managing them in a gallery right after the plugin installation.
It allows you to create standalone galleries that aren’t tied to your pages. You can also add beautiful slideshows to your website.
Envira is easy to customize and has many filters and hooks. Moreover, it’s quite easy to proofread images.
Key Features
- Pagination function for splitting large galleries
- Sharing options on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and more with social media integration
- Password protection is available
- Sales are friendly with WooCommerce integration
- Improves SEO with a deep-link feature for the images
4. Responsive Lightbox & Gallery
Responsive Lightbox and Gallery plugin stands out as one of the best WordPress gallery plugins with over 200,000 active installations. The user-friendly drag-and-drop interface allows you to create beautiful galleries and customize them.
The plugin’s flexibility, extensive customization options, and enhanced features stand out. You can play with three beautiful gallery templates: Grid, Slider, and Masonry.
Similarly, the remote library allows you to access millions of images. The plugin is also compatible with the Gutenberg editor.
Key Features:
- Eight responsive lightbox scripts
- Offer advanced pagination and infinite scroll
- Compatible with popular page builders
- Conditional logic on loading scripts
- Supports multisite
5. Photo Gallery by FooGallery
The next addition to our list is Photo Gallery by FooGallery, available with pre-built templates.
The plugin offers live previews while making galleries. Its standout attributes are the First Input Delay, the Largest Contentful Paint, and the Cumulative Layout Shift.
The advanced settings of Photo Gallery allow you to customize your gallery and the caption fully.
It’s a responsive, retina-ready, and Gutenberg-ready WordPress image gallery plugin that is free of charge.
Key Features
- Custom CSS for galleries, albums, and thumbnail filters
- Easily customizable captions, hover effects, and animated loading effects
- Multi-site support and Gutenberg ready
- Gallery widget and retina thumbnail support
- Seven pre-built and three pro-responsive gallery templates
6. Modula Image Gallery
Modula Image Gallery is another free WordPress gallery plugin that is easy to use and highly customizable.
The plugin offers a random grid to create a unique-looking gallery. You can also choose to keep the random grid option off to create a classic, old-everyday-style gallery.
Modula Image Gallery features a one-click gallery setup in five styles: masonry, polaroid, image grid, mosaic, and YouTube gallery. It also has 40+ built-in hover effects.
Further, you can add to the user experience with Modula’s title and video subtitles features.
Key Features
- Modula video extension for combining videos and images
- Right-click protection
- Migration tool to migrate videos from Envira Gallery, FooGallery, NextGEN Gallery, and more
- Includes helper grid to place the image
- Custom watermarks for picture protection
7. Robo Gallery
One of the best WordPress image gallery plugins is Robo Gallery by RoboSoft.
The plugin allows you to create a gallery in minutes and has dozens of quick-start demos.
With Robo Gallery, you won’t need to adjust many settings to get started. Moreover, if you’re short on time, you won’t even need to create everything from scratch.
Besides, Photo Gallery features a Gutenberg module without needing shortcodes.
Key Features
- Media manager for auto-resizing thumbnails and images
- One-click setup with more than fifty pre-configured styles
- Customizable gallery tree and album support for multiple categories
- Offers advanced polaroid styles
- Lightbox settings with color and transparency selector
8. Image Photo Gallery Final Tiles Grid
Yet another best free WordPress gallery plugin is Image Photo Gallery Final Tiles Grid by WPChill. With its brand-new algorithm, you can create a unique gallery.
Image Gallery provides one lightbox and supports another popular gallery plugin, EverlightBox. Along with photographs, it’s compatible with video content, too.
A handy benefit of the plugin is that it doesn’t crop the images and preserves the original image size.
Furthermore, the plugin’s remarkable features include product showcases, wedding photo galleries, photography and designer portfolios, and more.
Key Features
- Fully responsive and adapts to browsers on any devices
- Allows options for manual or random image sorting
- Offers tiles and column layouts
- Social media sharing
- Customizable margins and layouts in Tiles and Columns style
9. Video Gallery
Video Gallery is a beginner-friendly, free WordPress image gallery plugin specializing in video galleries for WordPress websites.
This plugin by Total-Soft supports videos from YouTube, Wistia, and more. It enables you to showcase your video collection in a beautiful gallery.
Video Gallery supports all sorts of WordPress themes. It works perfectly for all kinds of sites, whether you have an entertainment website or a blog.
In addition to easy editing features, Video Gallery offers 16 templates and nine gallery layouts.
Key Features
- No limit on the shortcode generator
- Offers sleek lightbox and video lightbox effects
- Nine gallery layouts and sixteen free video gallery themes
- Skew, Scale, Translate, and Rotate effects
- An easy-to-understand editor for creating unlimited videos
10. Photonic Gallery & Lightbox
Photonic Gallery & Lightbox is yet another must-have free WordPress gallery plugin. Its gallery wizard makes it easy to build your gallery in no time.
With this plugin, you can allow specific visitors to see private and protected pictures with their special authentication.
Photonic supports Google Photos, SmugMug, Flickr Photos, Zenfolio, etc.
You can use Gutenberg with Photonic Gallery, where the plugin creates blocks, not shortcodes. However, it also allows you to use shortcodes for galleries.
Key Features
- Beautiful collection of layouts
- Built-in support for the highest amount of lightbox scripts
- Supports gallery and lightboxes for videos
- Deep-linking and social media compatibility with Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, and more.
- Supports Flickr, Smugmug, and Zenfolio concepts
11. Portfolio Gallery
Another free WordPress gallery plugin on our list is Portfolio Gallery. You can set up an image gallery with an amazing design in minutes using the plugin.
Portfolio Gallery can also add image titles and captions. The plugin has color options to add multiple colors for the filters button.
When you use this plugin to create an attractive portfolio for your site, you can also view the numbering for the included images.
Portfolio Gallery allows you to create filters for your portfolio gallery effortlessly.
Key Features
- Default masonry-style galleries with an option for grid layout
- Option to show gallery with or without spacing
- Grayscale effect and multiple colors option for filters
- Offers lightbox for responsive bootstrap image
- Fully responsive on PC, tabs, Mac, and mobile devices
12. Meow Gallery
Meow Gallery has also made it to our list of the best free WordPress gallery plugins.
The plugin offers a Gutenberg module and various photo filters. It’s also one of the fastest plugins.
Meow Gallery has five layouts: tiles, cascade, square, masonry, and justified. It’s also SEO-friendly, so your image list will be included in your sitemap.
The plugin includes a “Map Layout” for travel photographers and vacation planners, perfect for sharing trip photos in a gorgeous gallery.
Key Features
- Infinite loading and lazy load tool for a smooth experience
- Compatible with PhotoEngine and Lightroom for editing
- Link gallery with Google Maps
- Caption options on your videos
- Audio story images feature for adding music and audio to images
13. Photo Gallery – GT3 Image Gallery & Gutenberg Block Gallery
Last but not least, we have GT3 Photo Gallery, a WordPress gallery plugin with different custom gallery blocks. It empowers you to extend the functionality of the WordPress image gallery.
Using its global settings and individual gallery, you can fully customize the look and feel of your galleries. It’s also optimized to meet the Google PageSpeed requirements, delivering lightning-fast performance with a score of 100 in speed tests.
Further, the plugin is compatible with page builders like Elementor, Divi, and more. Meanwhile, the default WP gallery still works even if the plugin is turned off.
Key Features:
- The gallery works well with pages, blog posts, etc.
- Special video settings for each video item
- 1-9 columns to display photos
- Supports YouTube and Vimeo video gallery
- Advanced options panel
14. Gallery PhotoBlocks
The next addition to our list is Gallery PhotoBlocks. Similar to Image Photo Gallery Final Tiles Grid, it’s the plugin by WPChill.
It’s another perfect tool for composing visually appealing galleries. The lightbox feature allows you to zoom into the images effortlessly.
Gallery PhotoBlocks even provide special effects while loading the pictures or on mouse hover.
The plugin’s editor can set up a justified photo gallery. On top of that, you get to add special effects to your grid gallery.
Key Features
- Lightbox feature for zooming images
- Clicking an image opens a page or video
- Special effects during loading time and mouse hover
- Rapid image delivery with Content Delivery Network (CDN) support
- Fast-loading galleries with image shuffle
Wrapping Up the Best Free WordPress Gallery Plugins!
So, these were our compilation of the top-notch free WordPress gallery plugins. Choose the one that best suits your WordPress site.
These plugins make creating the perfect image gallery effortless, with features like gallery layouts, lightboxes, social sharing, pagination, and more.
Similarly, if you’re interested in more WordPress plugins such as donation, lead generation, call back request etc., check out our blog page.
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