Photo Gallery, Sliders, Proofing and Themes – NextGEN Gallery vs Photonic Gallery & Lightbox for Flickr, SmugMug & Others

WordPress Gallery Plugin NextGEN Gallery has been the industry’s standard WordPress gallery plugin since 2007 and continues to receive over 1.5 million new downloads per year. It’s easy to use for simple photo galleries, but powerful enough for the most demanding photographers, visual artists, and imaging professionals who need a comprehensive photo gallery solution. NextGEN Gallery offers complete WordPress gallery management with the ability to batch upload photos, import metadata, easily add, delete, rearrange photos and create an unlimited number of galleries. You can even simply provide a zip file or choose a folder to upload photos. But our photo gallery plugin doesn’t stop there! NextGEN Pro This plugin is the lite version of the NextGEN Gallery plugin, which offers all the gallery features you’ll need like photo albums, lightboxes, backups, search, sharing, filtering, print fulfillment, eCommerce, animations, and tons more. Click here to purchase the best photo gallery plugin for WordPress now! The free version of NextGEN gallery provides three main gallery styles (slideshow, thumbnail, and imagebrowser galleries) and two album styles (compact and extended), all of which come with a wide array of options for controlling size, style, timing, transitions, controls, lightbox effects, and more. Learn more about NextGEN WordPress Gallery Plugin features. The best gets better with full support for the Gutenberg block editor. Now you can add a photo gallery or album anywhere on your site, with a page builder type feel directly in the WordPress editor. We truly make creating, building, and editing galleries easy. Feature List We’ve built NextGEN Gallery to be extremely powerful and full of features. Albums Organize multiple photo galleries into albums for easy sorting and viewing Tags Group multiple images together with tags, with easy-to-update renaming and management eCommerce Sell images from your photo gallery, or sell entire galleries with our built in payment processing. Works with Stripe and PayPal. Slideshows Make your galleries automatically rotate through a series of images Themes Access 84+ different types of themes to showcase your galleries Animations Create visual interest with 25+ different types of animations for each gallery Watermarks Protect your work with image and text-based watermarks. Capabilities Customize who can read, edit, and publish galleries with refined permsisions controls Image Proofing Let your customers choose which photos to purchase and improve your workflow. Print Fulfillment Sell your photos and ship prints directly to customers with automated print lab fulfillment and zero commissions Auto Tax calculations Automatically calculate sales tax when required for your customers. Coupons Offer discounts and incentives to increase your gallery sales Lightroom Integration Automatically sync and create photo galleries from Adobe Lightroom into NextGEN Gallery without any need to update your website. Social Sharing Create viral social media opportunities when your images are optimized for Open Graph and X Image Commenting * Add deep engagement to your images within the lightbox to increase gallery engagement Deep Linking Link directly to a specific image from one of your galleries Frontend Search * Add powerful filtering for your gallery based on tags Hover Captions * Add social sharing, tiles, and descriptions for each image Digital Downloads Offer digital downloads of your images for free, or chage for them with our eCommerce gallery plugin Right Click Disable prevent images in your galleries from being downloaded with easy right click and drag/drop protection. Customization * We’ve built in lots of individual customizations for each of our features so that you can make NextGEN Gallery perfect for you As you can see, we’ve built a photo gallery plugin that is suitable for everyone! Want a specific or missing feature? Just let us know. NEXTGEN GALLERY DEMOS *Basic Thumbnail Gallery *Basic Slideshow Gallery *Basic Imagebrowser Gallery *Basic Compact Album *Basic List Album NEXTGEN PRO DEMOS *Photo Print Sales *Photo Proofing *Digital Downloads *Pro Mosaic Gallery *Pro Masonry Gallery *Pro Tile Gallery *Pro Filmstrip Gallery *Pro Lightbox About Imagely NextGEN Gallery is a WordPress gallery plugin maintained by Imagely. We’re the WordPress photography experts. In addition to NextGEN Gallery, NextGEN Plus, and NextGEN Pro, we also make WordPress themes for photographers, providing beautiful turnkey websites for photographers. Learn more or connect with us: *Imagely Website *WordPress Themes for Photographers *Turnkey Photography Sites *NextGEN Gallery Documentation Credits Copyright: Imagely 2016-2024 Shortcodes NextGEN Gallery offers an easy-to-use Insert Gallery Window, which means you never need to work with shortcodes again when inserting and manageing galleries – if you would prefer not too. If you do want to work with shortcodes, there is a powerful shortcode system as you’d expect of a popular WordPress gallery plugin. Learn About NextGEN Gallery Shortcodes. For more information, feel free to visit the official website for the NextGEN Gallery WordPress Gallery Plugin.

Photonic takes the WordPress gallery and super-charges it with a lot of added functionality. It adds support for several new sources and parameters to enhance the content and look-and-feel of your galleries. It supports Flickr photos, Albums (Photosets), Galleries and Collections, along with SmugMug folders, albums and images, and Zenfolio photos, Photosets and Groups. You can also set up authentication so that visitors can see private and protected photos from each provider. When used without the Gutenberg editor Photonic by default overrides the gallery shortcode. In case you happen to be using a theme or plugin that already overrides the gallery shortcode, Photonic provides you with the option to use your own shortcode for Photonic galleries. This lets your plugins coexist. Bear in mind that if you deactivate Photonic you will have to remove all instances of this custom shortcode, something that is not required if you stick to the gallery shortcode. When used with Gutenberg Photonic creates no shortcodes, rather it creates blocks. If some of your posts were written with Gutenberg and some without, Photonic supports both scenarios. Lightboxes Of all plugins free or paid, Photonic has support built in for the highest number of lightbox scripts. This includes scripts that run on pure JavaScript without relying on external libraries, or those that require jQuery. Pure JS Libraries BaguetteBox BigPicture “Gie” Lightbox (GLightbox) LightGallery PhotoSwipe v4 PhotoSwipe v5 Spotlight VenoBox jQuery Based Libraries Colorbox Fancybox2 – not GPL, so the script is not included with the plugin. See the Lightboxes page for details Fancybox3 Featherlight Image Lightbox Lightcase Strip Swipebox Thickbox Obsolete Libraries Fancybox 1 – no update since November 2010 Magnific Popup – no update since February 2016 PrettyPhoto – no update since May 2015 For the non-GPL alternatives like Fancybox2 and the obsolete libraries, Photonic has code to work with them, but you have to install the scripts yourself or rely on them from your theme or another plugin. With the exception of Thickbox the lightboxes have been adapted to become touch and gesture-friendly. See the Lightboxes page for details. Support for Multiple Platforms Flickr The following Flickr concepts are supported in Photonic: Photos PhotoSets (Albums) Galleries Collections Single Photo Authentication For demos of Flickr support visit the Flickr page. Google Photos Google API Change: With effect from 31st March 2025, Google’s Photos API is discontinued (see here for Google’s official announcement). Consequently, Photonic no longer works for Google Photos. For more details, see this thread. Note that while Google’s official announcement says otherwise, as of 20th April 2025 the API is still working, so older versions of Photonic will seem to work. However, there is no guarantee about when Google will truly shut it off. SmugMug The following SmugMug concepts are supported in Photonic: User Tree Photos Albums Folders For demos of SmugMug support visit the SmugMug page. Zenfolio The following Zenfolio concepts are supported in Photonic: Photos PhotoSets (Galleries and Collections) Groups Group Hierarchies For demos of Zenfolio support visit the Zenfolio page. Instagram In mid-September 2022 Meta / Facebook / Instagram changed its rules to disallow individual developers (i.e. developers not operating as a business) from meaningfully using its API. As a result, Photonic no longer works for Instagram photos. The code is still in place though, and can be used by someone with a business wishing to adopt it. Native WordPress Galleries Your existing galleries are left intact. However you can add a style parameter to a native gallery to open it up to Photonic. The style parameter can take any of the values documented on the Layouts page. Other Photonic Goodies Gallery Wizard The WordPress Classic editor shows up with a button that says “Add / Edit Photonic Gallery”. Clicking on it launches a wizard that helps you interactively build out a gallery with just a few clicks. Gutenberg Support The Gallery Wizard can be accessed via Gutenberg / the Block Editor as well. While creating a block, just look for Photonic. Please refer to the documentation. Video Support Photonic provides gallery and lightbox support for videos as well. Videos of the following sorts are supported: External videos from YouTube or Vimeo can be opened in any of the lightboxes apart from Image Lightbox, Thickbox or BaguetteBox Self-hosted or external videos in MP4 formats can be opened in any of the lightboxes apart from Image Lightbox, PrettyPhoto, Strip or Thickbox Videos hosted by external service providers (Flickr, SmugMug etc.) can be opened as a part of a gallery in any of the lightboxes apart from Image Lightbox, PrettyPhoto, Strip or Thickbox. Some lightboxes have issues with specific features. Please refer to the Lightboxes documentation for more. Deep-Linking and Social Sharing Photonic provides deep-linking support for non-WP images, and by extension, supports social sharing to Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. Beautiful Layouts Photonic displays your galleries in multiple forms: A grid of square thumbnails (the default) A grid of circular thumbnails (like Jetpack) A neat justified grid A masonry layout A “horizontal” masonry layout, for those who prefer having their masonry layouts sorted horizontally A tiled, random mosaic (a much improved variant of the Jetpack Tiled Gallery layout) A slideshow, using the Splide script See the Layouts documentation page for details and examples. Obsessively Comprehensive Documentation (OCD) Photonic’s documentation is comprehensive to the point of obsession. And yet, if you find something missing, please feel free to get in touch via the support forum.