14 Kick-Ass Wordpress Plugins to Make Your Photo Blog Rock
Photography blogs are probably in the top 3 most popular category when it comes to building a blog. Some people use services like Flickr for their photos, but nothing says professional more than having your own personal photo site. We’ll show you how to make the most of the photo plugins for Wordpress on your blog.
Using Wordpress Plugins to make your photo blog stand out from the crowd
When it comes to putting together a pro photo blog, photographers are often hampered by the lack of the graphic design skills and programming knowledge required to build something that matches their creative vision. This is where the combination of a professionally designed Wordpress Theme and a series of the best photo Wordpress plugins can help you rise above the competition.
In today’s post, we’ll explore the best of the best Wordpress plugins for photo blogs.
1. Super Slider – MooFlow
Description: If you like the iTunes Cover Flow animations where you get to flip or drag through beautiful mirrored images of your CD collection, you’ll love Super Slider. A great way to show off your photography, it also comes with a fullscreen function for maximum impact.
2. Shadowbox JS
Description: ShadowBox JS is one of many LightBox photo gallery solutions, where the background darkens to highlight you photos in a very attractive way. Choosing a favorite is really up to the individual. Personally, at One Night Site we like ShadowBox best. It has a nice simple aesthetic with next and previous navigation at the bottom beneath the photo. The standard Lightbox has the nice big next and previous buttons that cover both halves of the photo making it really easy to navigate, but in usability tests we’ve performed, users often don’t realize this is an option and close the Lightbox thinking it only contains 1 photo and not a series.
ShadowBox is also very lightweight in terms of code and always fits the whole photo on the screen, where LightBox tends to let the photo fall off the bottom a bit. It can also handle other types of media such as Video and offers fully configurable options for this.
For a demo, you can scroll half way down the page in Step 3 and click on one of the Wordpress theme reviews.
URL: Download ShadowBox JS Wordpress Photo Plugin
3. WP Cycle
Description: WP Cycle is a Wordpress plugin that allows you to have an auto-rotating image gallery. The best part is that you can assign a link to each photo to direct someone to a new page or site. This could be very useful if you are trying to get someone to buy one of your photos.
The biggest limitation for me is the lack of a true auto-scaling option. You have to define the dimensions of the slideshow in advance and photos will be badly stretched to fit it sometimes. For this reason I think this would be the perfect solution for a banner rotator – where you have a fixed size banner display showing a range of your photos as ads, and clicking through to a detail page.
It’s not the most feature rich plugin, but the developer has plans for some good improvements which will make it really solid.
Also has nice smooth animation transitions between photos.
Demo of WP Cycle Wordpress Plugin
Here is an example of it in action (they all link to the same place for this test):
Note: There are 2 ways to include this slideshow in your post, one of them (works better for me) requires that you insteall the EXEC-PHP plugin.
URL: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cycle/
4. Ordered Thumbnails
Description: When you add several photos to your blog post, the photo that gets chosen to show up on your homepage (in the list of posts in synopsis form) as a thumbnail is always the one you uploaded last. This is a pain in the butt. Many a time I’ve uploaded the primary photo and published the post, only to come back at a later date and add another photo to the post. Lo and behold, it changes to be the default thumbnail on the homepage.
Ordered Thumbnails gets round this problem by letting you choose which of your post photos should be used for the thumbnail.
Nicely done.
URL: Download WP Cycle Wordpress Plugin
5. Scissors
Description: This plugin adds cropping, resizing and rotating functionality to the standard Wordpress photo upload and management screen. It makes it much quicker to write posts on the fly or when you don’t have the time to mess around with photoshop.
URL: Download Scissors Wordpress Plugin
6. Snipi for Wordpress
Description: Snipi is a Firefox Browser Plugin that lets you drag n drop images from anywhere on the web, and have them immediately appear in your Wordpress media library. Very awesome and totally Kick-Ass!
URL: Download the Snipi Wordpress Plugin
7. flickrRSS
Description: A popular way to get your Flickr photos to show up your blog. It supports user, set, favorite, group and community photostreams and has fully configurable options. A nice way to quickly get your blog filled with content if you have lots of photos on Flickr already.
URL: Download the flickrRSS Wordpress Photo Plugin
8. Img Title Removal
Description: This does exactly what it says. It strips out the title attribute from img tags. The reasons for this plugin (removing the mouseover text) are not why we’re recommending it. There is an inherent problem with Wordpress when you insert an image from the Media Library. If you set the title of the image before inserting it, it will use the same text for both the alt and title tags. From what I’ve read, this is actually an SEO faux pas. It’s best to leave the alt attribute in place in the img tag, but only apply the title attribute to a href tags where they really belong.
Essentially it’s a dead simple plugin that could potentially make your code just that squeak better for Google.
URL: Download Img Title Removal
9. Random Image Widget
Description: Allows you to insert a selection of randomly generated photos into your blog posts and sidebar. The number of photos is user selectable. This is a great way to keep the content fresh on your site.
URL: Download Random Image Widget
10. Comment-Images
Description: This Wordpress plugin allows your readers to upload photos into their comments. Great if you are having a discussion around photography and people want to respond with their interpretation of a subject, or for a contest where people can submit photos for the community to see and comment on.
URL: Download Comment-Images Wordpress Plugin
11. Exif & Zoom
Description: If you are a serious photographer and include EXIF data in your photos for descriptions, titles, shot data (aperture, ISO etc.) and copyright information, then this Wordpress photo plugin allows you to display it with your photos.
URL: Download Exif & Zoom
12. Image Shadow
Description: The Image Shadow plugin adds a drop shadow to your images, giving them a little extra design pop. You have to play with the settings a little for the best effect.
Our preferred settings are the defaults with these changes (example shown):
Opacity: 0.4
Distance: 5
Width of frame: 5
Only modify images with img class: Yes
URL: Download the Image Shadow plugin
13. NKMImageField
Description: A pretty specific plugin but very useful. Some Wordpress themes require you to set the value of a Custom Field for certain images (such as a header image on each page). As an example, the Urban Elements theme that we show in Step 3 – Find a Wordpress Theme requires you to do this for each post so that they can do their really cool border treatment for the photo.
NKMImageField makes it easier to find the URL to be pasted into the custom field by providing a User Interface for the Media Library so you can choose your photo.
14. Post videos and photo galleries
Description: This is something of an all-in-one media presentation plugin – handling slideshows, videos, music, menus amongst other things. check out the screenshots for some inspiration.
URL: Download the Post videos and photo galleries Wordpress plugin
What’s Next?
Later this week we’ll be reviewing one of the best new photo site Wordpress Themes and we’l be digging into this list of photo plugins as we show a showcase photo blog. So if you are thinking about creating your own photo blog, keep checking back, or subscribe to our RSS feed to make sure you don’t miss it.
If you have a photo site that you’ve used Wordpress plugins on, send us a link in the comments below to share it with our community and give you some free publicity.
Jonny
I use LightBox a lot for my photo sites, and I prefer how it looks to ShadowBox, but it’s always bugged me when I add a longer description how it pushes beneath the fold and people can’t read it.
I tried hacking the Javascript code to get it to stay within the window but I couldn’t get it to work ShadowBox definitely does that better, but with the text at the top it also falls behind the photo if you write too much.
Any better solutions out there?
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One Night Site Reply:
July 3rd, 2009 at 1:21 pm
I tend to agree about the visual side of things. I like the thicker white border at times, especially for dark photos. And the caption is nicely designed into the basebar. I also found it a bit annoying that it drifted off the screen slightly – like only 50px, but enough so that people would miss the description and sometimes the close button.
With so many LightBox type plugins out there, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before the next really cool one comes along combining the best of both worlds.
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One Night Site
Really liking #12 – Image Shadow looking back over this list. You could make a better frame in Photoshop, but for the simplicity of what it does it is pretty awesome.
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