While WordPress stands way ahead of anyone else as the world’s most popular content management system, it is often the case that bloggers and website owners can get much more out of it by using a range of plugins to enhance the site and the reader’s experience. Of the plugins available, image related ones tend to be the most popular, especially for sites that are reliant on visual features and the variety of content rather than just a deluge of text.
What are the best image plugins you can use on your WordPress site, and what features will they give you to help enhance the user experience of your pages?
Next Gen Gallery
This free plugin is great for anyone who wants to be able to easily store and manage multiple galleries in their site storage space. Whether you are looking to feature specific images or set up attention grabbing slideshow features, Next Gen enables the user to do this and more. This plugin stands out largely for the simple admin and maintenance features that are missing from other similar options but lack management options.
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Awesome Flickr Gallery
If you are a big user of photo-sharing websites, plugins such as this enable you to share your photos from social media without having to keep them in your sites’ database. We have highlighted this free Flickr example for its simplicity and options for customizing and making your galleries appear as you want them to, but there are dozens of great plugins available that can integrate with Instagram, Pinterest, and various other social networks where you might have stored your pictures.
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Shutter Reloaded
This is our final free example before moving onto two premium plugins. Although not an especially popular option, we love Shuttle Reloaded for the range of features and the flexibility it gives to users.
It is great for web novices who do not have the first clue about HTML or image sizing, for example, as it resizes itself to give your page the optimum appearance. This plugin is also excellent for boosting the loading times of images, as well as being compatible with all of the main browsers, keeping your WordPress site looking great on the screen.
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Shutter Reloaded
Shutter Reloaded is an image viewer for your website that works similarly to Lightbox, Thickbox, etc. but is under 10KB in size and does not require any external libraries. It has many features: resizing large images if the window is too small to display them with option to show the full size image, combining images in sets, redrawing the window after resizing, pre-loading of neighbour images for faster display and very good browser compatibility.
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The Image Wall
If you want to go further than images, and feature videos and other media, The Wall is the plugin for you. This plugin allows you to leave everything either as it is, or add a range of effects to brighten up or put a moody slant on your shared media.
Check out one of these plugins today and make your WordPress site stand out above the rest, whether you are a business owner or an individual blogger, these image plugins will enhance your site and lift it to a new level.
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