WordPress is our recommended blogging platform for a variety of reasons, one of which is its extensive library of 3rd party plugins. These plugins make life easier for us bloggers and photographers, with functionality ranging from aesthetics to SEO. However, the problems with any extensive library are saturation and convolution. For example, there are 18 Twitter-related plugins, 19 Facebook plugins, and dozens of SEO-related plugins. So this article is intended to serve as a guide through the jungle. Here are the Best WordPress Plugins for Photographers. We’ll review the following types of plugins:
- Site Management WordPress Plugins
- Workflow WordPress Plugins
- Social Media WordPress Plugins
- Photo Gallery WordPress Plugins
Note: This article was originally published in 2014 and updated in 2022.
Site Management WordPress Plugins
Here are the Best WordPress Plugins for Photographers when it comes to site management. A few of these, such as Akismet, Yoast, and Broken Links Checker are considered must-haves, while others like Gravity Forms and Duplicate Page should be used when appropriate. If you feel that I’ve left out some important ones, feel free to comment with recommendations in the comment section of this article.
Auto Image Attributes From Filename With Bulk Updater
As we mentioned in our article on the top SEO mistakes photographers make, adding Alt text is an important part of image SEO. Instead of having to type in specific alt text each time, this plugin automatically adds image attributes such as Image Title, Image Caption, Description And Alt Text from Image Filename. The plugin can update image attributes for both new images and existing images in the media library.
Aksimet
The Akismet WordPress plugin ships with WordPress 2.0 and later by default, but make sure you activate it and input your API Key. If you’re tired of all of that comment and trackback spam, Automatic Kismet (Akismet for short), is your no-brainer solution. If, for some reason, you don’t have the plugin, you can download it here
Yoast SEO Plugin
Broken Link Checker
Broken Links, i.e. links that lead to an error or unavailable content, hurt you in two ways. First off, they reflect poorly on the content of your site, as it makes the information you present seem outdated and/or inaccurate. Secondly, it hurts your SEO, as you get dinged by search engines for every broken link on your site. The hard part about managing broken links is that the process of the link becoming broken is not controlled by you. If the webmaster or the site owner decides to change the URL or remove a page, a broken link is generated. With Broken Links Checker, you can avoid these problems, as it warns you in the dashboard of your WordPress site when your site contains a broken link.
Duplicate Page
Sometimes you want to duplicate a page instead of creating a new one. his plugin makes that process as easy as a click instead of having to copy and paste over all of the content into a new post. This is particularly useful if you’ve customized the formatting of a page and want to simply duplicate and replace some or all of the content.
Workflow WordPress Plugins
Here are the WordPress Plugins for Photographers that can help you in your workflow. However, they may not be necessary depending on your particular workflow and client management system.
Booking Calendar
Give your clients an easy way to see when you are available and to contact you about shooting. This plugin give your website a simple booking system that your clients can use to setup shoots with you.
Gravity Forms
This is actually a paid plugin, but Gravity Forms provides a look and feel that the other free form plugins just won’t provide. If you have any kind of form on your site, whether it be a contact form, an album order form, or any other form, Gravity Forms will give it sleek functionality and aesthetics. With conditional fields (fields that appear only when a certain other value in the form is selected) and validation (functionality that does not allow the form to be submitted unless certain forms are filled out correctly) these forms are worth the small price.
A functional alternative to this plugin is Contact Form 7, which is not as intuitive to set up but offers enough features and community support to get the job done.
Editorial Calendar
I don’t know about you but I am always starting new posts for my blog and scheduling them ahead of time. This plugin makes it easy to visually see when your posts are scheduled and drag-n-drop to make changes to your publishing schedule.
Social Media WordPress Plugins
Social Media is one of the most effective forms of marketing for photographers. These plugins help you integrate your social media accounts with your website and make your content easier to share on different networks.
Smash Balloon Social Photo Feed
Instagram is still a critical portfolio of a photographer’s work and an important marketing tool. This plugin displays Instagram posts from your Instagram accounts, either in the same single feed or in multiple different ones. Related Reading: How to Make Instagram Reels with Photos
Social Snap
Social snap is a powerful WordPress plugin that helps make the sharing of your content easy. Here are the primary features:
- Allow visitors to share your posts and pages.
- Display social links that automatically display followers counts.
- Automatically post on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn when you publish new posts.
- Analytics
- Automatically post old posts on social networks.
- Click to Tweet
- More
Remember to also read our article on how to How To Get Facebook Mobile To Upload Your Images In High Quality.
Weblizar Pin It Button On Image Hover And Post
Pinterest is a great platform for discovering the work of photographers. This plugin makes it easy for your users to pin images from your website. Read our article on Pinterest marketing for photographers for more information.
Photo Gallery WordPress Plugins
Below are the best WordPress Plugins for Photographers when it comes to photo galleries. You likely won’t need more than one Photo Gallery WordPress Plugin. So experiment with the following plugins and choose the one or two that you need for your blogging and content creation workflow.
Modula
The Modula Plugin checks all of our boxes for a photo gallery WordPress plugin in terms of aesthetics and options. It speeds up our blogging workflow by makes image spreads easy-to-create and modify. This ultimately results in a better overall display of our images and better storytelling. See our full Modula Review
NextGEN Gallery
NextGEN Gallery is a WordPress plugin that allows you to create lookbooks, image galleries, and slideshows. With this plugin, you can easily add images and videos to your website, and re-arrange them into albums. You can also customize the look and feel of your galleries, and add social sharing buttons to make it easy for visitors to share your content. NextGEN Gallery is a great way to showcase your photos and videos, and add some personality to your website.
Enviara Gallery
Envira Gallery is a responsive, user-friendly WordPress gallery plugin with the following features:
- Drag-and-Drop WordPress Gallery Builder
- Custom themes for each WordPress gallery
- Gallery Templates
- Responsive Mobile Friendly
- Albums & Tags
- Social Media Integration
- Ecommerce Store
- Watermark & Protection
- Slideshow & Fullscreen
- Deeplinking & Pagination
- Video Support
SlideDeck
This is the ultimate WordPress gallery/slideshow plugin. Not only is it completely SEO friendly, but it is also completely Responsive. That means that it will work on any sized screen. In the age of tablets and smartphones this is a must for photographer websites.
What do you guys think? What other great WordPress plugins did we leave out? Leave a comment and let us know about any plugins that you use on your photography website.
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In my experience, WordPress is a hellish time suck. Photographers have much better solutions with platforms like Squarespace and Wix.
Hey Anthony,
Creating a portfolio for a photographer is an essential thing. For that, the Portfolio Designer Lite WordPress plugin is a great tool. It has many amazing features like 8 different hover effects, cross-browser compatibility, inbuilt fancy box and lots more.
Thanks for a very helpful article. I can see how these Plugins can add benefits & functionality.
I hear different opinions as to “how many WordPress” Plugins you can use on 1 website without degrading load times & optimization.
1. What is your view as to how many are too many?
2. Can you use most Plugins when needed and disable when not using?
Regards
http://www.techlazy.net
Great list, thanks a lot! I’m a photographer from Germany and I’m using some of the listed plugins, too :-)
But I think there is one brilliant WP-plugin missing.
One year ago I needed a plugin for my WP-portfolio to organize my clients and provide their photos in a secure way. I found the plugin “Photography Management”. It is exactly what I was looking for. I’m so glad I found it and my clients love it, too.: https://wordpress.org/plugins/photography-management/
Can’t forget NextGEN Gallery & NextGEN Pro so photographers can sell prints easily, do proofing and sell digital downloads (and much more!)
Informative and useful.
I’m trying the SEO Friendly Images right now.
o yeah :) Works like a charm.
Need to get some of these for sure!
Thank you for this useful list. I am desperately trying to find a plugin that a customer can enter a date and it will tell them whether i am free or not. Does anyone know if such a plugin exists? (I don’t want to show a calendar)
For best online photography marketing WordPress SEO by Yoast is by far the most important plugin
Wow :) Thank you !!
Some of the best plugins for photographer, worth a look
http://wpplugindirectory.org/list/useful-plugins-for-photographers/
Great article on WordPress plugins! We recently released an Album Proofing plugin for WordPress. There are lots of costly subscription based services for album proofing and we’ve eliminated reoccurring costs for photographers with our plugin. Please check it out when you get a chance! http://photopressplugins.com/
[…] 5 Essential WordPress Plugins for Photographers […]
I think you left off an important tool for photographers – plugin to sell prints to clients like our plugin Sunshine Photo Cart.
Also, WordPress SEO by Yoast is by far the most important plugin – even more than Sunshine – as web marketing is essential to every photographer and this is the best SEO one available.
Hello
The Flip Image Plugin is so easy to use a child could do it.
Visit here For Flip Image Plugin.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-flip-image-free
Thanks.
Good work, on flip-image plugin. Its great and all… but why wouldn’t you just do a simple css transition? Then use it everywhere? That way you don’t have to limit yourself to just images?
Just a thought,
-Jonathan
Good info… I’m a blogger myself and I’m using this one
right now http://wordpress.org/plugins/iframe-embed-for-momentme/
. It creates a 360° perspective of your images. great for enhancing your web
content.
Another great list. I recommend the Sendola plugin for future updates.
It lets users send your contact details to their phone for free. check
it out
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sendola/