With over 4 million users worldwide ranging from average school kids to big corporate houses, Wordpress is undoubtedly the most popular and feature-rich blogging platform available today. What makes Wordpress stand out from the competition is its flexibility. Without any coding skills whatsoever it can be easily customized to serve almost every purpose you can think of. The secret behind this flexibility is a large number of easily integrable extensions or plugins.
With over 10,000 plugins it is impossible to discuss each of them in detail and at once. So, the following is a comparative study of only the most popular Wordpress gallery plugins with which you can easily integrate a photo or video gallery within your Wordpress site or even start an exclusive photoblog.
A) Nextgen Gallery : This is probably the most popular photo-gallery plugin for wordpress. Its impressive list of features includes:
i) Automatic thumbnail generation
ii) Easy watermarking of your published photos
iii) Easy integration with Thickbox, Lightbox and Highslide
iv) Optional integration of flash animation as an add-on.
v) Integration of a gallery to any page or post with the help of a shortcodes.
The major downside of this plugin is that due to the presence of so many advanced features it might appear confusing and intimidating to most beginners. Also integration of Flash animations is not really as easy as it sounds and may require some technical expertise.
B) Photosmash Gallery : It is an alternative to Nextgen gallery. Apart from flash animations and watermarking its features are quite similar to those of Nextgen gallery. A few additional features are:
i) It allows users to upload their own photos to your site which can then be moderated by the administrator. Photosmash also has a feature to automatically e-mail the contributor when his photo is approved/rejected.
ii) In-built classic 5 star rating scale where users can rate or favorite your photos.
iii) Piclens viewer may be enabled to create easy slideshows of your gallery(s).
Photosmash is a lot easier to manage than Nextgen Gallery but contains almost all the useful features , probably making it a better choice for Wordpress beginners.
C) Flippingbook Gallery : This is a much more user friendly gallery plugin as compared to Nextgen or even Photosmash. Though lacking in a lot of the advanced features it still performs its job quite admirably. Designed in the form of a book, it uses Flash to enable the viewer to simply leaf through your album. It also provides easy printing options for your photos.
D) Cincopa Wordpress Plugin : Cincopa is another animated gallery plugin designed in the form of a rotating belt containing the thumbnails. Apart from Photos you can also display your videos, music etc. with the Cincopa plugin.
A few other less popular Wordpress gallery plugins include:
1. WP Photo album 2. Picasna 3. Superslider-show 4. Lightbox Gallery 5. Page Flip Image gallery 6. Cleaner Gallery.
Anish Dasgupta - Hi ya folks, I'm an 18 years old undergraduate currently studying Chemical Engineering. Apart from that I'm an active blogger ( ...
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