WordPress Photo Plugins

One thing that WordPress is really great for is creating Photography Websites/Blogs. Not only because WP can easily manage all your photos and content, but also because there are many really cool plugins out there that are perfect for photographers.

But it is not just photographers that want to incorporate pictures into their site these days….In fact, you may have noticed that almost every new Premium WordPress Theme has some sort of post thumbnail function that shows a photo along with your post and then again on the homepage.

Photos are definitely an integral part of any blogger these days. In fact, many people do not even read a post if there is no image along with it. For as the saying goes…”A picture is worth a thousand words”. When you arrive at a blog post from any search, the first thing you will see is this cool photo describing what the post is going to be about. And most the time if you like the image you will probably stick around to read the entry.

Same goes for photography sites. If you arrive to a photographer’s site and you do not see any pictures, rather just a blog with text you will probably “bounce”.

What types of Photo Plugins are out there?

There are actually many, many plugins out there. In fact, making a quick search for the terms “photo plugins” on WordPress.org there were 394 results! Now that is a whole crap-load of plugins. Which is why we wanted to write this post to showcase some of the Best Photo Plugins out there.

Now you do not have to go through and find all the great plugins on your own. And to make this post even better we have divided the plugins into various categories so you can quickly find what you want without having to read all the boring text.

We will not cover all the plugins, but here are some really great ones to get you started.

Gallery/Album Plugins

1. NextGen Gallery: Fully integrated WordPress gallery plugin with a flash option.
2. WP Photo Album: Manages and displays your photo albums.
3. Gallery Widget: Show random images in your widgets.

Pop-Out Image Effects

1. Lightbox Plus: Ads the colorbx image overlay tool for wordpress.
2. Slimbox Plugin: Adds the Slimbox Javascript to your wordpress installation. Simply add a tag to the link that you want to show in a slimbox.
3. FancyBox: Integrates Fancy Box to WordPress.

Flick Plugins

1. Flickr Photo Album: This plugin will let you pull your Flickr photosets and show them as albums on your site. It is super easy to use, basically put in your id and the photostream and it will stream onto your site. Plus with an added template you can customize it to match your site.
2. Flickr Post: Just tag your photos with the term “WordPress” and the post’s “slug” and they will appear on the post.
3. Flick Widget: Very simple plugin that displays you latest flick photos on the sidebar or any other widget area.

Picasa Plugins

1. Picasa Photos: This plugin chooses random picasa photos from your account and shows them on your WordPress widget.
2. Picasa Lightbox: Displays your images of choice right from picasa.

WordPress Photography Themes

There are many great WordPress Themes that already come with many of the features of these plugins already built in, making it much easier for photographers to create an awesome site. If you want to see some awesome samples checkout Photography WordPress Themes.