Best WordPress gallery for small museum and library collection
September 17, 2014 8:27 AM Subscribe
I'm putting a small (about 120 items) museum/library image collection online. My organization is using WordPress to create a simple website for this collection, and I need help finding the best gallery/portfolio plugin to display these images. What's your favorite WordPress plugin for this, and why?
I'd like something with both a thumbnail and click-through to the full sized version. Things like multiple image sizes and zoom and the ability to add good metadata would be even more awesome, but are not necessary. I only want to add basic metadata right now, so each image would need a display with room for creator, title, date. What is your favorite WordPress gallery/portfolio/image display plugin? (This question was asked back in 2007, but I'm assuming things have changed since then...) Thanks!
I'd like something with both a thumbnail and click-through to the full sized version. Things like multiple image sizes and zoom and the ability to add good metadata would be even more awesome, but are not necessary. I only want to add basic metadata right now, so each image would need a display with room for creator, title, date. What is your favorite WordPress gallery/portfolio/image display plugin? (This question was asked back in 2007, but I'm assuming things have changed since then...) Thanks!
Response by poster: I should have said at the outset: for various reasons having to do with our own technical environment, we considered and rejected Omeka. I would agree that it's an excellent solution for most situations like this, but we are committed to WordPress for a host of (long, boring, but good) reasons.
posted by lillygog at 9:13 AM on September 17, 2014
posted by lillygog at 9:13 AM on September 17, 2014
I had a quick play around with FooBox and FooBox Image Lightbox last weekend and really liked the flexibility.
posted by humph at 4:02 PM on September 17, 2014
posted by humph at 4:02 PM on September 17, 2014
I've just started playing around with the Illustratr theme - it might work for your purpose. You can set them all on one page as a 'portfolio'.
posted by hydra77 at 8:12 PM on September 17, 2014
posted by hydra77 at 8:12 PM on September 17, 2014
Response by poster: I've done some more poking around, and for our needs it looks like PhotoGallery from webdorado will suit our needs. It has a simple thumbnail browse that can display image titles and (important for library/museum collections) and the lightbox has the option to view and download the original image size, also important for us, since we want to make the large, nice scans available for general use. The lightbox also includes title and description, again important when we need to talk about date, title, creator, etc. for images.
A lot of the formatting options only come with the pro version, which is a yearly subscription, but relatively affordable so we're thinking about it. (Although one-time purchases are much easier for us.)
I do think it's worth re-iterating that for most small library/museum collections Omeka is a great solution -- it just didn't work for my org in this situation.
posted by lillygog at 10:26 AM on September 20, 2014
A lot of the formatting options only come with the pro version, which is a yearly subscription, but relatively affordable so we're thinking about it. (Although one-time purchases are much easier for us.)
I do think it's worth re-iterating that for most small library/museum collections Omeka is a great solution -- it just didn't work for my org in this situation.
posted by lillygog at 10:26 AM on September 20, 2014
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posted by susanvance at 8:49 AM on September 17, 2014