Photo Gallery, Sliders, Proofing and Themes – NextGEN Gallery vs SimpLy Gallery

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.

SimpLy Gallery helps you create responsive photo and video galleries, albums, and sliders in the WordPress block editor, with a built-in lightbox for exploring your content. Start by organizing your media into folders and tags with SimpLy Media Assistant. Turn a selection into a gallery, publish it on its own page, or reuse it across your site with blocks and shortcodes. When you need a local copy of a collection, download its original files as a ZIP from the WordPress admin. Bring photos, video, and audio together in the same gallery, whether you are presenting a portfolio, documenting an event, or sharing a collection of tutorials. Group related galleries into albums so visitors can explore them from one starting point. Ready out of the box Mixed media in one gallery: images, HTML5 video, audio, YouTube, Vimeo, and VideoPress. Block editor-first editing with 8 included gallery blocks and visual controls. Responsive layouts with controls for desktop and smaller screens. Lightweight YouTube and Vimeo galleries with one active video embed at a time. Static gallery content by default, similar to native WordPress gallery blocks. Albums and Album Navigator for grouping saved galleries under one visitor-friendly entry point. Page-level lightbox manager for Image blocks, Gallery blocks, linked images, and SimpLy galleries. Saved galleries and shortcodes for reuse across pages, posts, and theme areas. WordPress Media Library folders and tags with SimpLy Media Assistant for organizing, finding, uploading, and reusing media. Download a SimpLy folder’s original files as one ZIP from the Assistant or the Media Library folder sidebar. Quick static gallery creation from SimpLy folders and tags with Import Media from SimpLy Folders/Tags. SEO-friendly media visibility with static fallback HTML output. Uses standard WordPress media sizes without creating extra image copies. Tags Filter for visitors, with bulk tag management in the Items Manager. Video poster generation from a frame of your self-hosted video. Admin-controlled random gallery order without adding extra controls for visitors. Optional Media Library and media picker integration, so site owners can choose how deeply SimpLy Assistant appears in their admin workflow. For more specialized projects, optional PLUS and PRO plans extend these tools: PLUS adds layouts and visual customization, while PRO also adds dynamic galleries built from supported media and content sources. SimpLy Media Assistant – WordPress Media Library folders Use SimpLy Media Assistant to keep photo shoots, events, products, or project materials in virtual folders within your WordPress Media Library. A file can belong to several collections without uploading another copy. Open Media > SimpLy Assistant to browse, upload, and organize your files. You can also enable the folder sidebar in the native WordPress Media Library to work in its familiar grid or list view. Add the same media file to multiple virtual folders without copying originals or changing their URLs. Let authors organize their own files and folders, with built-in permissions to protect other users’ collections. Find and reuse media by filtering with SimpLy folders and tags. Upload files into the active folder and organize existing media into collections. Edit folder names, descriptions with basic HTML formatting, and colors in one dialog. Duplicate a folder’s collection without copying its files, then adjust its membership independently. View folder details, including creation information for new folders and the number and total size of readable originals. Sort folder lists by date added or name, ascending or descending, across the Assistant and gallery source pickers. Turn an organized folder or tag into a static gallery with Import Media from SimpLy Folders/Tags. Download a folder’s original files together as a ZIP archive. Attachment Organization shows a file’s assigned folders and available folders, so you can add or remove memberships with a click. When removing files from multiple folders through Unassigned, choose which folder memberships to remove. Files shared by multiple folders remain the same media items: editing a file or deleting it from the Media Library affects every collection that uses it. Download media folders as ZIP Need a local copy of a photo shoot or a project’s media? Right-click a SimpLy folder in the Assistant or the Media Library sidebar, choose Download, then Create ZIP. Once preparation finishes, choose Download ZIP to save the originals together, without selecting and downloading each file separately. The archive uses the folder’s name and remains available to its creator for repeat downloads for one hour. You can delete it sooner to free disk space; deleting a prepared ZIP does not delete the original media. ZIP Downloads in the plugin settings checks whether your hosting can prepare archives and lets administrators adjust the maximum total file size and number of files per archive. Start with the defaults and increase them to suit your hosting resources. Choose where the Assistant appears Enable SimpLy folders in the Media Library, add the Assistant to native WordPress media pickers, or use the SimpLy Media Picker for SimpLy gallery blocks. You can also use the dedicated Assistant screen without enabling these integrations. PRO users can additionally build dynamic galleries from SimpLy folders, so published collections can reflect folder changes instead of remaining a one-time static import. WordPress media sizes, no extra image copies SimpLy Gallery Blocks does not create additional image copies in the WordPress Media Library. For normal gallery display, the plugin uses standard WordPress image sizes, mainly Medium size for thumbnails and Large size for lightbox viewing. If the Medium size image is too small for a specific frontend layout, SimpLy Gallery can use the Large size image for the thumbnail area when needed. This happens on the frontend with JavaScript and does not create new files in the Media Library. If you want higher quality thumbnails or larger lightbox images, adjust your WordPress media settings in Settings > Media before uploading images. Existing uploads may need thumbnail regeneration after changing these settings. PLUS / PRO options can also display the original image size when maximum image quality is needed. Albums Albums let you combine multiple saved galleries into one collection with a dedicated splash page. This is useful for events, portfolios, projects, travel collections, courses, product collections, or any site where related galleries should be presented together. Each saved gallery can keep its own design and can also be published separately as a public gallery page, inserted with a shortcode, embedded with the Saved SimpLy Gallery block, or displayed with the Elementor widget. Album content can load saved gallery content on demand via AJAX and open it in a modal view, helping large gallery collections stay lighter on the initial page load. Albums and Album Navigator are available in the free plugin. PLUS adds more visual customization options, and PRO allows Album Navigator to use dynamic galleries from supported sources. Tags Filter Tags are managed directly inside the gallery block. In the Items Manager, each gallery item has a Tag menu where you can type tags separated by commas or choose from previously used SimpLy Tags. Items Manager also includes a multi-select mode, so you can select a group of gallery items and add or remove tags for all selected items at once. When Tags Filter is enabled for the block, those tags appear above the gallery so visitors can filter gallery items on the frontend. The basic Tags Filter is available for gallery blocks in the free plugin. PLUS / PRO plans add more control over which tags appear in a specific gallery or block, along with advanced options such as deep linking. Page-level lightbox for WordPress content SimpLy Lightbox is more than a lightbox for SimpLy galleries. It can also work with regular WordPress content, including Image blocks, Gallery blocks, linked images, and Classic Editor gallery content. When WordPress Image or Gallery blocks use the “Link images to media files” option, SimpLy Lightbox can open those images in a lightbox and group images from the same post or page into a browsable lightbox set. This means visitors can open one image and use next / previous navigation to browse other images from the page. Separate Image blocks and native Gallery blocks can also be grouped together, so a post can behave like one photo story instead of many isolated images. Global lightbox defaults are managed from SimpLy Gallery > Lightbox for native WordPress Gallery. Each post or page can also have its own lightbox settings through the SimpLy Lightbox editor sidebar, opened from the lightbox icon in the editor toolbar. Lightbox features include touch gestures, keyboard navigation, mouse wheel controls, zoom, thumbnails, fullscreen mode, slideshow, captions, and social sharing. YouTube Feed and dynamic galleries The YouTube Feed module turns YouTube playlists into a curated gallery workflow inside WordPress. You can build internal playlists, publish them with Quick Gallery Link, or use Dynamic Gallery Builder in the PRO plan for full design control. PRO dynamic gallery sources include: SimpLy folders YouTube playlists Vimeo showcases, albums, user uploads, channels, and categories WooCommerce products, categories, and tags FileBird media folders Media Library Assistant attachment categories and tags SimpLy tags Main demos Gallery blocks demo YouTube Feed Albums Block demo Album Navigator Block demo SimpLy Lightbox and WordPress Native Gallery demo YouTube and Vimeo Gallery demo More layout demos Viewer Gallery Block Slider / Carousel Gallery Tags Filter Advanced Tags Filter Showcase Gallery Block – PLUS layout Diamond Gallery Block – PLUS layout Horizon Gallery Block – PLUS layout Split Carousel Block – PLUS layout TagsBox Gallery Block – PLUS layout Portfolio Gallery Block – PLUS layout Short demo This video shows how to create a photo gallery with a SimpLy Gallery block: You can transform the same gallery content between Masonry, Justified, Grid, and WordPress image gallery layouts without rebuilding the gallery from scratch.