good image gallery plugin for wordpress?

October 24, 2007 10:32 AM

What's a good image gallery plugin for Wordpress?

I have a podcast with a wordpress website http://www.slangdesign.com/rppr and recently I got 18 images that I want to put on the website as a gallery. However, there are dozens of different gallery plugins for wordpress and the one I tried gallery.menalto.com/ is far too complex for me to install. I apparently needed to download and install imagemagick on my web server which is beyond my ability.

What can I download, ftp over to the plugindirectory and use?

posted by clockworkjoe to Computers & Internet (15 answers total)

Here's a light gallery script: Filebrowser/makers of Vanilla forum script, Lussumo.
posted by acro at 10:40 AM on October 24, 2007

(Not specifcally for Wordpress though).
posted by acro at 11:00 AM on October 24, 2007

I can't help noticing that three people have favourited this question already, with only one (non-plugin) answer so far. I suspect that is because this is the holy grail of WordPress quandries.

I'm a WP devotee of long standing and after having tried many, many WP plugins, several of which have "hey, finally something that really works!" comments, I have bupkis for an answer. The only person more annoyed by this is my husband, who I basically have to force to install various gallery candidates. I live in eternal hope but he's a grouchy pessimist at this point.

So I really hope you get an answer because I'd love one, too!
posted by DarlingBri at 11:04 AM on October 24, 2007

If you only have 18 pictures, why don't you just create pages for them?
posted by mzurer at 11:51 AM on October 24, 2007

Or use flickr?
posted by mzurer at 11:52 AM on October 24, 2007

To kind of expand on mzurer's comment; why not put them in a public set in flickr, and then link from your site to a flickr slideshow of the images?
Most of the work is done for you by flickr, and you still have them presented in a stylish, neat manner.
posted by willmize at 12:05 PM on October 24, 2007

I'd agree that if you're going to only have 18, and not add more quickly, that creating pages or just blog entries for each of the pictures is the easiest route.

The problem with finding an "ultimate" WP photo gallery is that there are so many different conceptual frameworks for presenting and administering this kind of thing; you and any given programmer may have different ideas about what's best. And even the best of them probably won't be as slick as Flickr, simply because of the resources available. There are some that act as blog-integrators for Flickr (or other photo-hosting services), like Slickr, which indeed looks pretty slick.

For whatever it's worth, if you don't already know about it, here's the Wordpress plugin directory Navigate to Media: Graphic files for the image galleries and related.
posted by adamrice at 12:35 PM on October 24, 2007

I'll piggyback on this question. I installed WP today (from my AskMe question), and I'm looking for a good gallery plugin. I just want something basic - Lightbox support, batch upload, watermarking if possible. I just put in Flexible Upload - works great for resizing, watermarking, and Lightbox, but not batch upload. Any thoughts?
posted by shinynewnick at 12:54 PM on October 24, 2007

If you put the pics on Flickr then one solution might be Pictobrowser. It makes a nice gallery that you can embed in a page or blog posting. It will grab pics, that you specify, from your Flickr account. I have used it in Wordpress though the linked page seems to offer a link to another site that suggests some small config (a plugin) might be necessary to get it work to work with Wordpress (config that I don't remember having to do to get it to work for me).

That said, I'd love it more if it could be used to display pics on a specified directory rather than just Flickr...
posted by gspm at 12:56 PM on October 24, 2007

1. Free Flickr account
2. Flickr-Tag WP Plugin
3. Install per the instructions
4. Write a new post. There will be a "Flickr" tab below the post box. Choose the set and it pops a grid right into your post.

Works beautifully and is cake to install. Quite configurable too; you can use specific images, tags or sets, as well as specify the appearance of the thumbnails/image size, etc.
posted by sprocket87 at 1:34 PM on October 24, 2007 [1 favorite]

I just this afternoon installed the Lazy K Gallery and it seems to work straight out of the box with no faffing.
posted by merocet at 1:51 PM on October 24, 2007

Response by poster: Only 18 images now, but I will probably add more in the future. Also, I've found the plugin directory before, but without some kind of review or evaluation system, how can I choose the best one? I don't want to try 20 different plugins to find the right one.

On the plus side, it seems I don't necessarily need image magick. http://gallery.menalto.com/node/70686
posted by clockworkjoe at 1:54 PM on October 24, 2007

The only thing I've found to integrate well with WP is JAlbum, which is another kind of content management system like WP (in other words, it is not a plugin, it's a stand-alone piece of software).

I really like the layout and the ease of updating, but I don't like the fact that you can't leave user comments and that it's not exactly seamless with WP.
posted by Brittanie at 3:54 PM on October 24, 2007

There's another collection of wordpress plugins which is a little more officialish, and does have plugin ratings.
posted by ambilevous at 1:15 AM on October 25, 2007

Highslide

Implement it with WP-Highslide

Demo 1

Demo 2

To use: click on a picture you want to view. To navigate from one picture to the next, use the arrow keys on your keyboard.
posted by mysterious1der at 6:20 AM on October 25, 2007 [1 favorite]