Wordpress - plugin for galleries?

Aubrey · October 29, 2015, 10:44:48 AM

I have recently built my own ubuntu server and I am now experimenting with various web software to display images.
I've looked at Juicebox and TinyWebGallery. I'm now getting more adventurous and considering a more involved web setup using Wordpress.

There are any number of gallery plugin's for Wordpress, I've started going through them.. whew!

Then I thought there must be IMatch users with servers

I'm looking to have thumbnails and then for viewer to select a full page and have a play pause icon...

Which gallery plugin's are you using?

Thanks,
Aubrey.

Ferdinand · November 03, 2015, 10:24:58 AM

It's a question of what sort of site you want. While there are gallery plugins for WP, I regard it mainly as blogging s/w. If you want a gallery site, there are better options in my view. I used to use Gallery3, but it is not longer being developed. Some of its more advanced users have moved to Piwigo. Others to Zenphoto.

Aubrey · November 03, 2015, 11:58:05 AM

Ferdinand,
Many thanks. I looked at Piwigo, but then discounted it; but this was early on the "building my own server" learning curve. It needed mysql and I was not familiar with syntax of this at that point. I'll look at packages you suggested.

Aubrey.

HerbertN · November 03, 2015, 01:23:10 PM

Hi,

I understand your challenge. There are dozens if not hundreds of gallery plugins... all with their own advantages and downsides.
Let me say... it really depends on what you want...

I personally use NextGen Gallery. I use the "new" version
https://wordpress.org/plugins/nextgen-gallery/
Which works well for me on two different sites. There is a free version of this plugin, and a paid version with additional functionality (e.g. additional styles for gallery pages in various forms). I use the free version, which is sufficient for my use.

Note: there was a huge shitstorm when the plugin was "sold" by the original developer to a company and the new software broke compatibility with older version causing all sorts of issues. Honestly: I never had any issues, and I think as many shitstorm, it was too much hyped. Of course everyone with problems voted "bad, broken" (and some still do), although it works fine for majority of users.
The original version was "forked" and is now maintained by a community
https://wordpress.org/plugins/nextcellent-gallery-nextgen-legacy/

What I like: this plugin can read some of the IPTC fields, and automatically populate title, keywords, tags and descriptions, from the values that I write into my files using iMatch into it's Wordpress database tables. This was for me a very important feature, that several other plugins didn't have. Those values can be shown as pop-up info (title) or below images opening in FancyBox popout (title or description). And Tags/Keywords can be used for functions like "show related pictures" or even creating a "tag-cloud" where visitors can then show pictures matching specific Tags.

All in all, I like the plugin, but then again: this is the one I use, so I have no experience with others. I chose it ~4 years ago, and never bothered to compared it to others....

Cheers, Herbert

Ferdinand · November 03, 2015, 01:29:38 PM

You can still download Gallery3, but it's not being developed, so it's a dead-end. I have a site running on it and a question that I have to face sooner or later is what to do with it. The person who created the Gallery3 theme I use migrated that theme to Piwigo after a comparative assessment of the alternatives, particularly Zenphoto. I trust his judgement, although his needs may not match mine. Even so, Piwigo seems to be the obvious option for me at this stage, but I haven't had the time to try to migrate that particular G3 site of mine to it. I'd be interested in what you ultimately decide to adopt, and why.

Aubrey · November 03, 2015, 07:29:40 PM

Herbert, Ferdinand,
Thank you both for taking the time to respond.

I will look at the Wordpress theme you discuss.

Ferdinand, having read review/comparison I'm also going to investigate Piwigo again and see what results

I'll post some comments of my experience.
Aubrey

hro · November 04, 2015, 05:43:03 AM

Quote from: Ferdinand on November 03, 2015, 10:24:58 AM
It's a question of what sort of site you want. While there are gallery plugins for WP, I regard it mainly as blogging s/w. If you want a gallery site, there are better options in my view. I used to use Gallery3, but it is not longer being developed. Some of its more advanced users have moved to Piwigo. Others to Zenphoto.

Aubrey, I agree with Ferdinand here. But it depends on what you want. If the focus is really on showing your photos using beautiful themes and having a decent system to manage them, then a dedicated gallery software is probably the way to go. I remember in a recent post you shied away from going this route. If you are revisiting this, then the comments in this post may be still relevant.

Here: https://www.photools.com/community/index.php?topic=4804.msg32690#msg32690

Ferdinand · November 04, 2015, 08:03:19 AM

To be clear, I'm not pushing Piwigo, since I still only have a test install at the moment. My main point is that you use blogging s/w if you want to run a blog with collections of images, and you use photo gallery s/w if you want to run an online gallery of your images. Perhaps there really is a Wordpress plugin out there that turns it into a gallery style site, but I've not seen one. If there is one then I'd like to know about it. Perhaps NextGen mentioned by Herbert is, and I may look at it when I next tackle the issue. Smugmug is pretty impressive, but I prefer to self-host on my own servers rather than paying for something I already have.

Mario · November 04, 2015, 09:08:23 AM

Maybe check out these lists:

http://wpdevshed.com/best-photo-gallery-plugin-for-wordpress/

I think that Envira is gaining some momentum:

http://enviragallery.com/

The best thing is, you can try them all out for free. Most have a free version with limited functions and a fairly priced "full" version.
And there are of course many free and paid WP themes which focus on presenting photo galleries instead of standard blogging. It all depends on what your focus is. Or, rather, what your audience expects. If your audience are photographers, you will have different demands that when the majority of your visitors are people who are used to the way Instragram presents images (and mangles them).

More than the most basic support for metadata is usually hard to get.