Do you want to take your website’s design to the next level? If so, installing one of the best free WordPress gallery plugins could be the solution for you.
In addition to improved design, WordPress gallery plugins are a great addition to websites that rely on visual content such as pictures and videos.
You can spend just a few bucks to get a quality gallery plugin. But, if you’re on a tight budget, there are plenty of free options that are equally reliable.
So, we’ve looked over tons of gallery plugins to prepare this list of the fourteen best free WordPress gallery plugins for your website.
Luckily, we have a few recommendations to check if you’re in a hurry.
Top Picks
1st
NextGEN Gallery
Features:
Stylish Layout
User-friendly Editor
Lightbox
Multiple Customization Options
FREE
2nd
Photo Gallery by 10Web
Features:
Easy Customization
Right-click Protection
Watermark
Modern web design
FREE
3rd
Envira Photo Gallery
Features:
WooCommerce Integrated
Social Sharing
Password Protection
Organized Gallery
FREE
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 in an organized manner.
- Sell Photos: Photographers and visual artists can also sell the pictures through a WordPress website with eCommerce-supported gallery plugins.
Now, let’s move on to the list of the best free WordPress gallery plugins!
14 Best Free WordPress Gallery Plugins
1. NextGEN Gallery
NextGEN Gallery is one of the best free WordPress gallery plugins on the internet. It allows for a seamless addition of a picture gallery on your WordPress website.
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 either as a thumbnail gallery or slideshow in either 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 is available with a powerful lightbox to present your content. It supports Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube, etc. for you to 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 free of cost that 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 manage them in a gallery, right after the plugin installation.
It allows you to create standalone galleries that aren’t tied up to your pages. You can also add beautiful slideshows to your website.
Envira is easy to customize, with many filters and hooks. Moreover, it’s quite easy for image proofing.
Key Features
- Pagination function for splitting large galleries
- Sharing options on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and more with social media integration
- Password protection available
- Sales friendly with WooCommerce integration
- Improves SEO with a deep-link feature for the images
4. Photo Gallery by FooGallery
The next addition to our list is Photo Gallery by FooGallery, available with pre-built templates.
The plugin comes with live previews while making galleries. First Input Delay, Largest Contentful Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift are its standout attributes.
Photo Gallery’s advanced settings allow you full control while customizing your gallery. Additionally, you get complete control over the caption too.
It’s a responsive, retina-ready, and Gutenberg-ready WordPress image gallery plugin free of cost.
Key Features
- Custom CSS for galleries, albums, and thumbnail filters
- Easily customizable captions, hover effects, and animated loaded effects
- Multi-site support and Gutenberg ready
- Gallery widget and retina thumbnail support
- Seven pre-built and three pro-responsive gallery templates
5. 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 gallery with a unique look. It also has the option of keeping 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 including masonry, polaroid, image grid, mosaic, and YouTube gallery. It has 40+ built-in hover effects as well.
Further, you can add to the user experience with Modula’s title and subtitles features for videos.
Key Features
- Modula video extension for combining videos and images together
- 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
6. Robo Gallery
One of the best WordPress image gallery plugins you can find is Robo Gallery by RoboSoft.
Even for starters, it’ll just take you a few minutes to create a gallery with this plugin. Furthermore, it’s available with dozens of quick-start demos.
With Robo Gallery you won’t need to adjust much in terms of settings to get started. Moreover, you don’t even need to make everything from scratch if you’re short on time.
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
7. Image Photo Gallery Final Tiles Grid
Yet another WordPress image gallery plugin free of cost is Image Photo Gallery Final Tiles Grid by WPChill. You can create a unique gallery with its brand-new algorithm.
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, a few of the plugin’s remarkable features are product showcases, wedding photo galleries, photography and designer portfolios, etc.
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
8. Video Gallery
Video Gallery is among the beginner-friendly WordPress image gallery plugins available for free. It specializes 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 edit 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
9. Photonic Gallery & Lightbox
Photonic Gallery & Lightbox is yet another must-have free WordPress gallery plugin. It has a gallery wizard with which you can 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 and 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 lightbox for videos
- Deep-linking and social media compatibility with Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter and more.
- Supports Flickr, Smugmug, and Zenfolio concepts
10. Portfolio Gallery
Another free WordPress gallery plugin on our list is Portfolio Gallery. It only takes a few minutes to set up an image gallery with an amazing design when you use the plugin.
Portfolio Gallery can also add image titles and captions. The plugin is available with color options to add multiple colors for the filters button.
When you’re creating an attractive portfolio for your site with this plugin, you’ll also be able to view the numbering for the included images.
Portfolio Gallery allows you to effortlessly create filters for your portfolio gallery.
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
11. 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 has various photo filters too. It’s also one of the fastest plugins.
Meow Gallery comes with five layouts; tiles, cascade, square, masonry, and justified. Similarly, it’s SEO-friendly; so, your image list will get included in your sitemap.
For travel photographers and vacation planners, there’s a “Map Layout,” in the plugin, 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
12. 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.
With an active installation of more than 6000, it’s the perfect tool to compose visually appealing galleries. And thanks to the lightbox feature you can zoom into the images effortlessly.
Gallery PhotoBlocks even provide special effects while loading the pictures or on mouse hover.
You can use the plugin’s editor to 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
- Pages and videos open with the image click
- Special effects during loading time and mouse hover
- Rapid image delivery with Content Delivery Network (CDN) support
- Fast-loading galleries with image shuffle
13. EverlightBox Gallery
EverlightBox Gallery is a safe and fast lightbox plugin that’s compatible with every other gallery plugin.
The plugin supports swipe gestures which allows users to navigate the images in your gallery in a much more convenient way. As a result, it improves the overall user experience.
It allows its users to fix bugs and pitch new features as per requirement. So, you can contribute to the plugin’s quality even as a user.
EverlightBox Gallery is compatible with galleries like PhotoBlocks Grid Gallery, Final Tiles, and more.
Key Features
- Social media sharing feature for Facebook, Pinterest, and Houzz
- Compatible on mobile devices with swipe gestures for browsing
- Supports Vimeo and YouTube videos inside EverlightBox
- Use with any linked images
- Compatible with FooGallery, NextGen Gallery, and Envira gallery
14. Gallery- Image and Video Gallery with Thumbnails
At last but not the least, Gallery is a great free WordPress image gallery plugin that allows you to showcase images with attractive animation and viewing effects.
The plugin offers different kinds of canvas animation. Furthermore, you can customize designs as per your album’s requirements.
It’s also tested for compatibility with most major WordPress themes. Additionally, you can select the crop height and width of pictures.
Furthermore, the plugin’s customization options allow you to change the count of elements and set the number of columns.
Key Features
- Customization option for border width, color, opacity, and radius
- Easy navigation admin dashboard
- Offers various canvas and standard animation
- Customization option for control bar, and description
- Features slide pause time
Wrapping Up the Best Free WordPress Gallery Plugins!
So, these were our compilation of the top-notch free WordPress gallery plugins.
Though there are 14 plugins to choose from, you can go with the one that features the functions best suited for your WordPress site.
With features like gallery layouts, lightbox, social sharing, pagination, and so much more, it’s effortless to create the perfect image gallery using these plugins.
Similarly, if you’re interested in more WordPress plugins for donation, lead generation, Google AMP, etc., please check our blog.
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