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Two thousand nine hundred and eighty-seven… That’s how many plugins a simple search for “gallery” returns at the WordPress.org plugin repository. It makes sense – pretty much every website uses images and WordPress photo gallery plugins make it easy to display those images in an attractive way.

But with so many options to choose from, it can be hard to dig through everything and find the plugin that offers just the right combination of features, aesthetics, and ease of use. To help you find that plugin, I’ve collected 9 of the best WordPress photo gallery plugins, dissected their feature lists, and grabbed a representative screenshot so that you know what types of galleries each can create.

You already know what galleries are, so let’s get right into the plugins!

Best WordPress Photo Gallery Plugins in 2019

• Modula
• NextGEN Gallery
• Envira Gallery
• Photo Gallery by WD
• Jetpack
• FooGallery
• Photo Gallery by Supsystic
• Justified Image Grid
• Everest Gallery Lite

 1. Modula

Modula is an extremely user-friendly WordPress gallery plugin from Macho Themes that helps you quickly create interesting photo and video galleries. With Modula’s range of flexible customization options, you can easily tweak your gallery to your liking.

With Modula’s custom grid functionality, you can freely resize images within your gallery’s container, controlling their heights, widths and aspect ratio. And, all you need to do is switch a gallery from ‘creative gallery’ to ‘custom grid’ and start changing the dimensions of your images by clicking and dragging from the bottom right-hand corners of the images in your gallery.

If you decide to give Modula a try, you’ll quickly notice that the plugin was developed to cater to WordPress users regardless of experience. Their easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface and customization options make it possible to create a gallery that looks just like one of their demos in less than five minutes, but, for more advanced users, Modula has an advanced customizations section wherein it is possible for users to add CSS that can be applied to galleries separately. This together with their well-written documentation contributes to what we believe is truly a great user experience.

A Typical Gallery Created By Modula Looks Like…

The free version of Modula, known as Modula Lite, is available on the official WordPress plugin repository and even includes their custom grid functionality. While you can play around with settings like margins, shadows, border radius, and more to alter how your galleries look, here’s a good idea of the style of galleries created by Modula Lite.

However, for users who want access to access to 6 lightbox styles, 12 image hover effects, create filterable galleries, add as many photos as they want – Modula’s plans start at $29.

Reasons To Use Modula

• The ability to design custom grids – freely resize images within the gallery container.
• Easily create a lightbox gallery with 6 different included lightbox styles.
• The ability to add image-entry animations (such as sliding and rotation).
• 12 hover effects built-in
• Ability to further customize your gallery with CSS.
• Premium Modula video extension available so you can easily add videos to your gallery.
• Built-in social sharing buttons that make it easy for your website visitors to share your work.

Things To Consider Before Choosing Modula

Modula is just for grid galleries – it’s not built to help you create showcases, slideshows, or other different forms of galleries like many of the other plugins.

Price: Free + Paid plans start at $29 for a single-site license.

2. NextGEN Gallery

By the numbers, NextGEN Gallery is the most popular gallery plugin at WordPress.org. It continues to receive over 1.5 million new downloads per year, along with great overall reviews. It’s developed by Imagely, photography experts who know the industry well.

The free version of NextGEN provides two main gallery styles (slideshows and thumbnail galleries) and two album styles (compact and extended), all of which come with a wide array of options for controlling size, style, timing, transitions, controls, lightbox effects, and more. You can then extend it with various premium bundles.

In addition to a variety of different gallery types, these premium versions also add more advanced features like:

• eCommerce functionality to sell images
• Image protection (hotlink protection, watermarks, etc.)
• Image deep linking for lightbox galleries

A Typical Gallery Created By NextGEN Gallery Looks Like…

One of the draws of NextGEN Gallery is that it offers so many different types of galleries, so there’s no single typical gallery.

I’ll use the basic thumbnail gallery for this example because it’s included in the free version. And if you go with the Pro version, you have access to a bunch more interesting templates:

Reasons To Use NextGEN Gallery

• You can create albums of different galleries, which is helpful if you need to display lots of different pictures.
• You can create slideshow galleries, as well as lots of other gallery types depending on which version you have.
• The premium versions offer advanced features like watermarks, image deep links, and more.
• NextGEN Pro includes eCommerce functionality, which is helpful if you’re selling photography.

Things To Consider Before Choosing NextGEN Gallery

• The free version used to be pretty basic, but they have been actively adding a lot more features. For example, the basic slideshow can show arrows, change the transition timing, styles, etc.
• NextGEN Pro is a little pricey at $99.

Price: Free. The cheapest premium bundle is NextGEN Plus at $79.

3. Envira Gallery

Envira Gallery is another popular freemium gallery plugin. Formerly part of Syed Balkhi’s WordPress empire, Envira Gallery was acquired by Nathan Singh in early 2018.