Image slideshows and galleries are pretty much a necessity these days. Good thing there are a ton of powerful, yet free WordPress plugins to choose from that can get the job done for you.

Because there are so many plugins to choose from, making the right choice is that much more difficult.

Finally, a WordPress Gallery Plugin that's Easy and Powerful. Envira Gallery is the best responsive WordPress gallery plugin. Here are the features that make Envira Gallery the most powerful and user-friendly WordPress gallery plugin in the market. Find the best free stock images about wordpress. Download all photos and use them even for commercial projects. Modula is one of the best WordPress image gallery plugin available today. Easily create photo & video galleries that are fast, responsive & unique looking.

Here are our 20 choice picks for all of your gallery and slideshow needs. Not only are these plugins free, but we’ve also put some consideration into performance, as well. After all, speed matters just as much as functionality.

Your Web Designer Toolbox

Unlimited Downloads: 500,000+ Web Templates, Icon Sets, Themes & Design Assets
Starting at only $16.50/month!

You might also like our collection of the Top 100 WordPress Plugins for 2017.

WordPress Slideshows Plugins

Soliloquy Lite

The free version of the popular slider plugin, Soliloquy Lite is an easy-to-use and flexible way to add great-looking slideshows to your WordPress website. Sliders you create are fully responsive and look great on any device.

Meta Slider

What makes Meta Slider so unique is that it utilizes four different types of slideshow scripts: Flex Slider 2, Nivo Slider, Responsive Slides and Coin Slider. Each has their own selection of transition effects. You have the ability to choose the one that works best for you.

Smart Slider 3

Smart Slider 3 gives you features that are normally reserved for “pro” versions (even though there is a paid version available here as well). The top-shelf features in the free version include dynamic slides – which can be automatically created from your WordPress posts. Also featured are video slides from YouTube and Vimeo content.

Ultimate Responsive Image Slider

Beyond its responsive namesake, Ultimate Responsive Image Slider sports a plethora of options to help you tailor a slideshow to your specific needs. For example, there’s now an option for Auto Height, which will allow slides of different heights to transition smoothly.

WordPress Carousel Free

Carousel sliders are often a handy way to display sponsored logos. With WordPress Carousel Free, you’ll be able to create a responsive carousel with mobile touch support.

WP Slick Slider and Image Carousel

Choose between an image carousel and a more traditional slideshow with WP Slick and Image Carousel. The plugin comes with pre-defined designs to ensure a great look.

Tribulant Slideshow Gallery

Tribulant Slideshow Gallery features a variety of styles – including the ability to display slide thumbnails above or below a slider. Through the use of WordPress Shortcodes, there are many customization options available.

Genesis Responsive Slider

If you’re using the Genesis Framework for creating WordPress themes, then the Genesis Responsive Slider will fit right in. The plugin will take the featured image, title and excerpt from a page or post and create a simple slideshow.

Wordpress Free Image Gallery Ideas

Cyclone Slider 2

Cyclone Slider 2 is billed as being easy enough for beginners and powerful enough for hardcore developers. The ability to create custom templates speaks to its appeal for web professionals, while being able to choose from a ready-made template lends itself to the novice.

Meteor Slides

If you’re into having a lot of choices when it comes to slide transition styles, Meteor Slides has you covered with over 20 of them. The mobile-friendly slideshows are also compatible with WordPress Multisite.

WordPress Galleries Plugins

Envira Gallery Lite

The cousin of Soliloquy (mentioned above), Envira Gallery Lite shares a very similar interface and feature set. Galleries are optimized for both speed and SEO.

Gallery

Gallery features a number of ways to display photos on your site. You can use a traditional photo gallery, a photo album made up of several galleries, a slideshow or a single-image browser.

Simple Lightbox

Simple Lightbox is a highly-customizable and lightweight plugin for displaying attractive lightboxes for your photos. Using themes, you’re able to customize the look and layout. Links can be automatically activated so that you won’t have to manually code them in.

FooBox Image Lightbox

FooBox Image Lightbox is a bit unique in that it works in conjunction with an already existing WordPress gallery plugin (including their own FooGallery) and adds a slick, responsive lightbox. It also works directly with WordPress galleries and captioned images.

Gallery by BestWebSoft

Gallery by BestWebSoft helps you easily build an unlimited number of photo galleries and albums. You may custom sort galleries using a number of different criteria. And, everything you create will be responsive to ensure mobile compatibility.

Easy FancyBox

Easy FancyBox will automatically link your .gif, .jpg and .png images inserted from the WordPress Media Library to open in a beautiful FancyBox lightbox. It also supports native WordPress Galleries and the popular NextGen Gallery plugin.

Unite Gallery Lite

Aimed at being both a video and image gallery solution, Unite Gallery Lite is built for speed and power. It’s responsive, touch-enabled and even has a zoom feature.

Instagram Gallery

Bring in images from your Instagram account and display them as either a photo gallery or slideshow. As you add images to Instagram, the plugin will automatically add them to your WordPress site as well.

Awesome Flickr Gallery

If you’re using Flickr, Awesome Flickr Gallery is quite a flexible solution for displaying galleries and albums on your WordPress site. It’s compatible with both public and private photos, offers image size and cropping customization, and can be spiffed-up via CSS.

Photoswipe Masonry Gallery

Using the PhotoSwipe JS gallery, Photoswipe Masonry Gallery turns standard WordPress Galleries into attractive masonry-style displays. Masonry is great for times when you want to display thumbnails of different sizes in a neat and orderly manner.

Define Your Image

Now that we’ve found 20 of the top free slideshow and gallery plugins for WordPress, it’s time to put them to good use. Find the one(s) that best represent your vision and share it with the world!

This post may contain affiliate links. See our disclosure about affiliate links here.

Given the wide range of plugins in the official WordPress Repository, it is safe to say that there are multiple plugins for every imaginable aspect of the platform. The downside of all this is that even experienced users find it difficult to recommend a plugin.

Galleries are an important way of managing and presenting multiple images or videos on a WordPress website. However, the concept of galleries has become so advanced that no single plugin could claim to offer all the features and functionalities associated with the implementation of galleries in WordPress. Nor this is something recommended.

The Top Ten Free Image and Video Gallery Plugins - in a Nutshell

Now, let’s take them one by one, shall we?

Photo Gallery by Supsystic

Photo Gallery is a great plugin by Supsystic that allows you to create multiple images and video galleries and portfolios. The plugin offers several styles and design options for generating grids and displaying galleries. The best feature of the plugin is the easy-to-use visual editor that offers a surprising range of features.

• Adds images from social media networks and FTP to the gallery.
• Adds links, HTML captions, and icons.
• Carousel Gallery.
• Compatible with all major WordPress themes.
• Highly customizable image gallery styles, including full-width
• Categories and Paginations.
• Layout options include mobile, horizontal, fixed, and vertical photo galleries.
• Gallery design optimized for all screens.
• Polaroid Gallery.
• Video gallery and post feed photo gallery.

NextGEN Gallery

NextGEN Gallery is easily one of the top WordPress gallery plugins of all time. The plugin allows users to add images from the media library, local folders, or a server folder to any gallery. A well-known feature of the NextGEN Gallery plugin is the option to create albums, which are basically groups of galleries.

• Adds a button for adding galleries in the visual editor.
• Several display options in the visual editor such as thumbnails, image browser, slider, and tag cloud.
• Two display options for albums: Basic Extended and Basic Compact.
• Intuitive interface.
• Visitors have the option to view the gallery in either thumbnails or slideshow view.

Envira Gallery

Envira Gallery is a great plugin that offers outstanding results. The plugin is fully responsive and ensures that image and video galleries load quickly. After the plugin has been installed, Envira Gallery is added to the WordPress Dashboard. The procedure for adding a gallery is quite easy; just give the gallery a name and then upload the images to it.

• Several customization options and settings including thumbnail sizes, columns, gutter and margin sizing, layouts, and animations.
• Users can insert galleries into any page, widget, or post.
• Adds a button to the visual editor that enables the quick addition of galleries.
• The Video Addon for Envira Gallery allows you to display Youtube, Vimeo, Wistia or self-hosted videos in an Envira Gallery’s Lightbox.

Portfolio Gallery

This plugin by Huge IT adds professional, elegant galleries and lightboxes to pages and posts on the website. Portfolio Gallery is very easy to set up, and loads images quickly. The plugin has a responsive design that ensures precise rendering of images on all screen sizes. The beauty of this plugin comes from the way it was built, coming up as four plugins in one: Huge-IT’s Slider, Video Gallery, and Image Gallery, as well as Lightbox. Portfolio Gallery brings them all to life.

• Professional-looking galleries.
• Easily add and edit images, captions, links, and decryption in a gallery.
• Add galleries via a button in the visual editor or short code.
• A wide range of gallery view options including thumbnails, masonry, pop-up content, lightbox, and slider views.

Gmedia Gallery

The best-known feature of the Gmedia Gallery plugin is the ability to share images quickly. When you click on an image in a gallery, a full-size image popups in a lightbox; this where you can also share your gallery on several social networks. Even though it is completely free, the number of options at your disposal will surprise (and confuse) you.

• Adds a versatile Gmedia button to the visual editor.
• Comes with a music and video player.
• A wide range of gallery view options called Modules; by default, seven different modules are available including slideshows, 3D sphere, mosaic look, sliders, 3D cube, and photo blog.
• Easy selection of images. However, the images need to be either assigned to a category, album, tags or placed in the GP Media Library.

Photo Gallery

The plugin uses the standard thumbnail view to display the images in a gallery. When you hover the cursor over an image, the plugin magnifies it slightly for a better view. Adding images using this plugin is quite easy; all you have to do is click on the Photo Gallery option on the WordPress Dashboard. The process of adding a new gallery is similar to adding a post.

• Embed photos from Flickr and Instagram.
• Import images from the Media Library.
• Customize the gallery with options including watermarks and designating text for images.
• The free version only supports thumbnail, slider, album, and image browser display options.
• The option to combine galleries into different albums.
• Support for YouTube and Vimeo videos within Galleries.

Foo Gallery

This plugin is quite straightforward and allows several gallery view formats. Like several other WordPress gallery plugins, Foo Gallery adds a custom button to the WP Dashboard. To create a gallery, simply choose the Add Gallery option, and use the Add Media option for adding images. Galleries can also be created from the visual editor. To use the plugin properly, a Lightbox plugin might also be required – the plugin was built with developers in mind because it comes with the tools a developer needs to build a custom image gallery.

• Several gallery templates including the standard thumbnail display, responsive gallery template, and masonry layout.
• A variety of options for customizing gallery templates such as specifying a thumbnail size, linking images, and others.
• Add a gallery to a page or post through the Add FooGallery button or through a short code.
• You can create mixed photo and video galleries but you need to get the pro version of the plugin.

Photospace Gallery

This plugin is designed to extend the default WordPress gallery settings. The selected image from the gallery is shown in the preview area on the right, while the rest of the images are displayed in thumbnail form on the left side. To use the features of the plugin, use the menu item for Photospace Gallery.

• Extends the default functionality of the WordPress gallery for a better view and easy management.
• Edit or add captions, titles, and descriptions of images.
• Change the size of the preview image as well as the thumbnail size per your liking.
• Control settings include links to next/previous images, options to play a slideshow, and a download link below every image in the gallery.
• You get keyboard control and pagination.

WP Photo Album Plus

This gallery plugin is specially designed for interactive websites where visitors can comment on and/or rate photos. While this feature could be turned off, this is usually the main objective of installing the plugin.

• Allows visitors to rate and comment on a photo.
• More customization options than typical WordPress gallery plugins.
• Widgets for photo ratings, Photo of the Day, top ten photos, most recently uploaded photos, featured photos, albums, and more.
• Settings displayed as a list of tables, allowing you to change several settings without leaving the screen.
• Easily set tags, alt texts, descriptions, and copy or move photos to another album.

WP Canvas – Gallery

The last plugin of the list is the WP Canvas – Gallery. Similar to Photospace Gallery, this plugin extends the default functionality of WordPress galleries. Instead of additional menu items, the options pop up on the right.

Wordpress Free Image Gallery Template

• Define the size of images and the number of columns of thumbnails.
• Default gallery settings offer several display options, caption, and size options.
• Specify popup size when an image is clicked.
• Switch between several gallery display options including a slider, carousel, and masonry.

In Conclusion

Whether if you’re a new WordPress user which found out what the Add Media button does or an experienced developer which knows how to code before MM even had WordPress in mind, there’s a solution serving media files for everyone. We saw plugins which are perfectly displaying images in grids, while others handling YouTube or Vimeo WordPress video galleries like pros – you have options. I only scratched the surface when it comes to presenting the features of all these plugins. It’s your turn now to dig into these image gallery plugins and pick the right one for your project.

Wordpress Free Image Gallery Creator