Even though WordPress has its own build in gallery function it isn’t very fancy. Unless you have good coding skills to modify the gallery your best option is a gallery or slideshow plug-in. The nicest plug-ins are build with jQuery making them very slick and dynamic.
A couple of the galleries even support more formats than just photos, like flash files, video’s and audio. I listed ten of the best galleries in my opinion. Most of the plug-ins are full of features and some with basic features that still provide more then WordPress own build in gallery.
Lightview
Lightview was built to change the way you overlay content on a website.
- Clean: Designed to compliment your content.
- Fast: Smart image preloading.
- Easy: Customizable without having to know CSS.
- Rounded: Adjustable rounded corners, no PNG images required.
- Smart: Content resizes to always fit on your screen.
- Slideshow: One button slideshow.
- Works on all modern browsers.
Shadowbox
Shadowbox is an online media viewing application that supports all of the web’s most popular media publishing formats. Shadowbox is written entirely in JavaScript and CSS and is highly customizable. Using Shadowbox, website authors can display a wide assortment of media in all major browsers without navigating users away from the linking page.
Fancybox
FancyBox is a tool for displaying images, html content and multi-media in a Mac-style “lightbox” that floats overtop of web page.
Featured Content Gallery
Featured Content Gallery is a WordPress plugin by iePlexus that creates an automated rotating image gallery of your posts or pages for use anywhere within your theme.
Sponsors Slideshow Widget
This plug-in is designed to be used as sponsors slide show widget. It can display a certain link category as slide show in the sidebar.
Flickr + Highslide
Features
- 13 unique ways of displaying your photos
- 8 different gallery styles
- Displays photos from a photo-set
- Displays all of a user’s photos
- Displays photos in latest or random order
- Ability to change the size of images and thumbnails
- Ability to separate photos into pages
- Displays photo titles
Flash Photo Gallery
A WordPress plug-in which creates a Flash Photo Gallery like one provided in Adobe Photoshop CS2 Flash Web Photo Gallery templates.
Fotobook
Fotobook is a WordPress plugin that will link to your Facebook account and import all of your photo albums into a page on your WordPress installation. It makes use of Facebook’s API so importing your photos is a breeze.
Photo Galleria
Photo Galleria is a simple, yet elegant, plug-in for photographers and designers who want to beautify and simplify their WordPress photo galleries. The Photo Galleria plug-in filters the default WordPress gallery shortcode and replaces it with an elegant jQuery-powered gallery.
Dynamic Content Gallery
This plug-in creates a dynamic gallery of images for latest and/or featured content using either the JonDesign SmoothGallery script for mootools, or a custom jQuery script.
