Tuesday, May 13, 2008

WordPress Plugins for Images, Photographs, and Graphics

Photographs and graphic images are an integral part of our blogs today. We want to show people what our words often can’t. Besides, pictures are fun to look at.

WordPress offers fairly simple image uploading and the automatic creation of thumbnails, but there are a lot more you can do with your images with WordPress Plugins.

There are a lot of WordPress Plugins to help you upload, sort, arrange, enhance, edit, frame, popup, popin, lightbox, photo album, work with online image storage support and services, and manage your images.

Unfortunately, not all media-based WordPress Plugins, no matter how impressive and fun, are well supported or well documented. Creating an image-oriented WordPress Plugin is challenge, hard work, and takes a lot of maintenance as technology changes and WordPress upgrades. Many create these for fun and then let them go. I’ve done my best to only highlight the WordPress Plugins which feature strong documentation, easy instructions, and show recent activity and support.

Let’s begin with WordPress Plugins that help you edit your images before publishing.

Photo Editing WordPress Plugins

Most digital images are created with cameras and scanners which include their own photo editing software packages. Thus, most people edit the image before they upload it, or they don’t edit it at all and just post it on their blogs as is. This may explain the few WordPress Plugins for image editing.

ImageManager is the most popular photo and image editing WordPress Plugin. It integrates the stand alone PHP ImageManager + Editor with your WordPress Administration Panels in WordPress 2x+ and WordPressMU.

You can browse and upload images quickly. From the Admin Panels, you can edit your images for cropping, rotating, flipping, and scaling, as well as create thumbnails.

It integrates well with other image-oriented WordPress Plugins such as Lightbox by Huddle Together and WP lightbox JS.

Lazyest Gallery is a well done image management WordPress Plugin featuring some editing capabilities such as thumbnails, resizing, and cropping. It also features good caching, framing, captions, international character recognition and handling, images from folders, stylesheet editor, and various gallery format presentations.

It works with many other WordPress Plugins and Javascripts for images as addons or built-in features such as Filosofo upload for uploading a single image as an album, Lightbox JS v2.0 Plugin and WP lightbox 2 for the Lightbox effect.

While not an editing tool, if you work with a lot of images on your blog like I do, the Batch Image Uploader WordPress Plugin is a treat. It puts back in the ability to upload more than one image at a time to your WordPress blog. It speeds up the process and gets those images ready for inclusion in your blog quickly.

PhotoPress is a WordPress Plugin that adds a pop-up loader and image browser to the Write Post panel. It also adds random image functions for displaying images in a album or gallery.

WordPress Plugins to Display Images on Blogs

There are two types of WordPress Plugins to help you to display images on your WordPress blog. The first type uses images you’ve uploaded to your blog’s server. The second type uses images from online image storage services such as , phpwebgallery, Zenphoto, and other online image hosting sites. Some gallery WordPress Plugins will work with only one resource, while others will service more than one.

The images are displayed in two basic formats:

  • Within a post or Page
  • In the sidebar, header, footer, or other template file outside of the post content area

Both formats typically use thumbnail images which link to a larger view of the same image.

The first format showcases images in a “gallery”, a page on your blog which showcases graphic images or photographs. The images are typically arranged in a grid pattern and may or may not feature outlines, borders, colored backgrounds, or other design elements to showcase and “frame” the images on the page.

Example of a photo album or gallery showcase on a blog

Gallery WordPress Plugins help you arrange the order of how the images are to be displayed, the size of the thumbnail, and other layout options. Galleries are also known as Photo Albums. Some gallery WordPress Plugins will automatically generate thumbnail sized images as you upload the pictures.

Galleries and photo albums can work in two ways. One method is to showcase all the images you have in a folder or account. The more popular method is to group images together, either by storing them in separate folders, assigning them categories or groups as a “collection”, or handpicking which images should appear manually. Some WordPress Plugins and image tools allow you to create sub-albums or sub-galleries, breaking up the main collection into smaller ones.

Add image via WordPress Text Widget on WordPress.com blogsThe second format for displaying images on your blog allows you to put images in your sidebar, header, footer, or elsewhere outside of your post content area. This technique usually involves familiarity with WordPress Themes and template files as you may have to edit them to add the appropriate code to generate the images.

Images on sidebars and headers can be shown one at a time randomly as the page views change, in a slide show where images change during the visitors time on the page, in a small grid as small thumbnails, and in many other formats smaller than the gallery effect found on page views.

Traditionally when a linked thumbnail image is clicked, the visitor is taken to a new page with only the large version of the image displayed. The background is typically white and boring and there is no caption, title, or information about the image. With recent advances in AJAX, Javascripts, and layering, images can now be viewed through the use of a lightbox or popin effect.

Popin effect on a thumbnail linked image shows the page belowThe popin effect loads the larger image in a new “window”, similar to a popup window. However, this is not a separate window but a javascript or AJAX effect created on a layer of the page. The image looks like it is in a window that may or may not be able to be moved around on the page. The most important characteristic is that the popin window sits on a layer above the page and you can still see and read the page underneath.

Lightbox effect with the image framed against a dark or faded background over the content belowThe lightbox effect hides the content on the page while showcasing the image on a top layer of the page. The hiding is done by blacking out or creating a semi-translucent background on the top layer framing the larger image. By fading out the page in the background, the larger image becomes the focal point.

Both effects feature a close window feature or the ability to click off the image to close the popin window feature. Many offer next and previous links to move through the displayed images without returning to the page underneath.

Be sure and check out the Photoblogs and Galleries information on the , the online manual for WordPress Users, as well as the WordPress Codex Image Plugins List for more information on using images in WordPress.

Display Uploaded Images

The following WordPress Plugins display images which you have uploaded to your WordPress blog’s server. Typically, they are in a core folder of your own choice, or one specified by WordPress or the Plugin. Some of these WordPress Plugins allow grouping of images into collections or sub-galleries or sub-albums through the use of sub-folders.

Yellow Swordfish’s Popup Image Gallery WordPress Plugin creates a user controlled slide show where the user clicks on the thumbnail images and sees the larger one in the main frame. It adds interesting slide show transitions, and the option to turn them off, and optional text under the slide show controls and captions. You can add random galleries and images to your sidebar as well as posts or Pages.

Lazy-K Gallery WordPress Plugin showcases images in a gallery form with thumbnail and slide caching features, and the ability to comment on each image or folder individually. You can include the gallery on a Page or post, and create sub-galleries.

Yet another photoblog, aka YAPB, is a WordPress Plugin that converts your WordPress blog into a photoblog. There are easy uploading features and you can write posts as you normally would. Thumbnails can be easily made of the images in several different sizes. EXIF data process and output is supported as well as full i18n international support, ping services, and can work on about any WordPress Theme. If your blog is all about the images and little article content, give this one a try.

Inline Gallery for WordPress allows for multiple galleries, captions, and integration with the Rich Text Editor (WYSIWYG editor), AJAX controls, and customizable template functions.

The d13gallery WordPress Plugin allows easily embedded thumbnail image galleries inside your WordPress posts. Images inside of the site’s folder are scanned, resized, and displayed in a simple grid layout as clickable images to the larger original image.

iGallery Plugin for WordPress is a different kind of gallery WordPress Plugin. The images are stored in a folder on your server, but you control which images are seen on your blog. You create a list of your images, each on a new line with a colon between them inside of the embedded image tag, and the photographs will be presented as a row of thumbnails with one large image above them. Click on a thumbnail image and the large image changes above. You can control the size of the thumbnails and the large image.

fGallery WordPress Image Gallery Plugin allows displaying images from the server with resizing and thumbnails, easy use of a Lightbox, will allow comments on images or not, displays an album RSS feed link, allows sorting the order of the images and albums, captions, and more.

IMG-Shark WordPress Plugin “grabs” images from the uploads directory and inserts them, as assigned, into your posts.

Other gallery and photo album WordPress Plugins that use images on-site include:

Online Image Hosting Service Integration with WordPress Blogs

If you store and share your images through , phpwebgallery, Zenphoto, or other online image hosting sites, there is usually a WordPress Plugin that will help you feature those images on your WordPress blog in different ways.

Flickr WordPress Plugins

The following WordPress Plugins integrate your blog with your Flickr account and images.

Flickr Photo Album for WordPress by tan tan noodles displays your Flickr photosets in your WordPress Administration Panels and allows you to control the look of how they are displayed on your WordPress Blog. You can easily insert your Flickr photographs and images into your WordPress Post edit panel and includes a lot of other powerful features.

FALBUM WordPress Plugin displays Flickr images and photosets with a lot of customization features on your WordPress blog including albums of recent images, viewing photos using tags, view tags in a cloud format, pulling EXIF data from Flickr, and much more.

Flickrspinnr WordPress Plugin creates a rotating 3D cube of your Flickr images in a sidebar widget.

Slickr Gallery WordPress Plugin is an AJAX photo gallery Plugin which allows you to bring your Flickr-hosted images and photographs into a gallery on your blog. You must have a Flickr account and a Lightbox WordPress Plugin for this Plugin to work. It also requires libcurl and XML PHP libraries on your host server.

Crossroads Plugin also works with Lightbox 2.0 and helps you add Flickr images to your WordPress posts or Pages with thumbnail images and Flickr photo comments.

Other Flickr WordPress Plugins include:

Gallery2 WordPress Plugins

The following WordPress Plugins work with images stored on .

Other Online Image Storage Services

The following WordPress Plugins work with other online image storage and sharing services.

Image Plugin Accessories

While not technically “accessories”, the following WordPress Plugins work with other Image WordPress Plugins or on their own to help you add more image features to your blog.

Fun and Helpful Image WordPress Plugins

iMax Width WordPress Plugin sets a maximum image width so large inline images won’t destroy your WordPress Theme layout and design. It adds height and width parameters to all IMG tags so the pages will load faster and conserves bandwidth times as well as the distortion caused by images loading after the text.

Lazyest Gallery Thumbs SlideShow Plugin rotates random image thumbnails from the Lazyest Gallery. It also comes as a WordPress Widget. You can control the portrait, landscape or both image types to show, the loops to run, fading delays, CSS styles, and more to create your thumbnail slide show on your WordPress blog.

Do you want your images to represent your posts? The Post Thumbs Plugin uses thumbnail images to represent your various posts on multi-post views and in the sidebar. If you have an image in your post, the Plugin will find it and convert it into a thumbnail and showcase that as a replacement for the text in a menu of images.

Rotating Images

A lot of bloggers want to feature an image that randomly rotates and changes as they watch, with each page view, or on a schedule. I’m using these in several of my blogs to display random photographs. Some WordPress Plugins and scripts which handle random image rotators include:

Lightbox Effects

Huddle Together Lightbox JS creates a lightbox effect which allows images to be seen individually or in groups, captions, has fancy visual effect and transition options to choose from, and is backwards compatible with older versions of WordPress.

WP Lightbox JS WordPress Plugin also uses Javascript to display images over the top of the current page with a “faded out” semi-transparent background. It adds a quicktag to your buttons on the Write Post panel for fast adding of the image information.

Thickbox works with the Thickbox WordPress Plugin to allow lightbox effects and more for images on your WordPress blog.

Other lightbox effect WordPress Plugins include:

Popin Effect WordPress Plugins

The popin effect creates a “window” on a layer above the page showcasing the image. Image popin effect WordPress Plugins include:

This is not representative of all the various image-oriented WordPress Plugins out there, but does give you a good sampling to try.

Do you have a favorite WordPress Plugin you use for handling and displaying images on your blog? What features are important to you and why? What do you recommend to other WordPress users and Photoblog enthusiasts?

A Month of WordPress Plugins…so far

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1 comment:

Unknown said...

Thanks for this helpful Blog.
I used a WordPress plugin that I found interesting. So I would like to recommend it.
The plugin helps me quickly create and customize images before inserting them in my blog post.
Check at: https://getpikiz.com/wordpress-plugin/
It’s free

9/04/2018 11:52:00 AM

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