Quit spending hours organizing photos on your WordPress website!
Whether you are a photographer or blogger, you’ll find a plugin on this list that fits your need perfectly.
Our list of the best WordPress photo management plugins will save you hours of manually arranging, editing, sorting, and optimizing heaps of photos in the WordPress media library.
Want to manage your images smartly?
Highlighted below are the best WordPress management plugins for building eye-catching galleries, organizing media files, and optimizing images.
Table of contents
- Photo gallery plugins
- Image organization plugins
- Image optimization plugins
- [Bonus] A photo management tool for non-WP users
Best WordPress Photo Management Plugins for Creating Galleries
1. Modula
If you’re a photographer looking to build an online portfolio or a creative looking to showcase some of your amazing work, Modula is a plugin you should check out.
Modula is a top-rated photo gallery plugin that’s mobile responsive, fast-loading, and comes with lots of customization options.
Modula allows you to:
- Create a simple, beautiful gallery with images and videos (from Vimeo, YouTube, etc.)
- Password protect your files so only a few persons would access them
- Set images to display as a slideshow in the lightbox
- Configure your gallery to display as a slider
- Create a unique URL for images in your gallery to improve the overall SEO of your website
- Automatically compress your pictures to make them load faster
- Group your photos into albums
- Add hover and loading effects to your gallery photos
- Disable the right-click mouse function to prevent visitors from downloading your images
- Automatically add watermarks to images in your galleries
See the complete list of features here.
Pricing
- Modula (Lite Version) – Free
- Modula (Pro Version) – Starts at $25
2. FooGallery
FooGallery is another WordPress plugin you can use to build stunning galleries in a few minutes. It is responsive, retina-ready, extendable, and super configurable.
FooGallery allows you to:
- Customize your photos by adding shadows, borders, hover effects, etc.
- Improve the appearance of your gallery by choosing from a variety of templates
- Enable the lazy load feature
- Split your gallery into pages
- Enable deep linking for SEO
- Organize your images into albums
- Create a video gallery using videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and other video-sharing platforms
- Preview your gallery’s appearance from the WP Gutenberg editor while making changes
- Easily import images from other photo galleries plugins
See the complete list of features here.
Pricing
- FooGallery (Lite Version) – Free
- FooGallery (Pro Version) – Starts at $59
3. Portfolio Designer
Portfolio Designer is a WordPress plugin that allows you to easily create a stunning photo and video portfolio for your WordPress. The plugin provides a user to create a completely customized portfolio with as much elegance as you need, no matter how huge your portfolio is.
Portfolio Designer allows you to:
- 4 layouts to display portfolios with the number of variations
- 50+ unique mouse hover effects
- Single portfolio design
- 4 different types of pop-ups to display images or gallery of images
- 8+ special image effects
- Generate any size of the image on the fly
- Several types of pagination options
- Display portfolios of any post type like testimonials, posts, logos, projects, and many more with filtration
- One-click import & export layouts feature available
- No limitation to present your custom post type’s fields
See the complete list of features here.
Pricing
- Portfolio Designer (Lite Version) – Free
- Portfolio Designer (Pro Version) – Starts at $39
Best WordPress Photo Management Plugins for Organizing Media Files
4. Real Media Library
Real Media Library helps you organize thousands of images into galleries, folders, and collections. And it adds an extra option to the WordPress media library that enables users to choose a destination folder when uploading photos.
Real Media Library allows you to:
- Create folders and drag-and-drop images into them
- Rearrange folders (and their content) by drag and drop
- Bulk select folders and delete unwanted ones with a single click
- Automatically upload your new images into specific folders
- Turn photos in a folder into a gallery via a Gutenberg block or with a shortcode
See the complete list of features here.
Pricing
- The Real Media Library plugin costs $39
5. Media Library Organizer
The Media Library Organizer plugin adds extra functionalities to the WordPress media library. With this plugin, you’ll be able to organize your files into categories (making it easy to navigate the media library and find images).
Media Library Organizer allows you to:
- Create multiple categories and group your images, videos, and other media files
- Bulk edit the categories, titles, and descriptions of images
- Configure default titles, alt tags, descriptions, and categories for new pictures you upload
- Duplicate media files easily
- Upload bulk images as ZIP files and organize them automatically into categories
See the complete list of features here.
Pricing
- Media Library Organizer (Lite Version) – Free
- Media Library Organizer (Pro Version) – Starts at $39
6. Folders
The Folders plugin allows users to group their images into folders (and also their blog posts, pages, music, and other content).
With Folders, you can upload and organize media files into directories and save yourself the stress of searching a huge library to find an image.
The Folders plugin allows you to:
- Upload a new media file to replace an existing one
- Create unlimited folders and drag-and-drop media files into them
- Import folders from alternative plugins
- Bulk select folders and delete unwanted ones with a single click
- Create multiple folders at once
- Distribute one image to multiple folders with a single click
See the complete list of features here.
Pricing
- Folders (Lite Version) – Free
- Folders (Pro Version) – Starts at $45
7. FileBird
FileBird helps WordPress users create virtual folders and arrange their media files into them. It’s an ideal tool for bloggers and online store owners looking to group their images into easily accessible folders.
FileBird allows you to:
- Create folders for your media files
- Export an entire folder’s content via a ZIP file
- Bulk select and move files using the drag-and-drop feature
- Import folders from other media management plugins
- Use a search tool to find specific files and folders via the post editor and through the media library
See the complete list of features here.
Pricing
- FileBird (Lite Version) – Free
- FileBird (Pro Version) – Costs $25
Best WordPress Photo Management Plugins for Optimizing Images
8. ShortPixel
ShortPixel is an easy-to-use, powerful WordPress image optimizer plugin to compress all the images on your website (including older ones and newly uploaded ones).
The plugin detects and compresses photos in bulk uploaded directly to the WordPress media library using gallery plugins such as NextGen and Modula.
ShortPixel allows you to:
- Compress images in multiple formats (JPEG, PNG, WebP, and GIF) without losing quality
- Detect and automatically compress bulk images in sliders and image galleries
- Convert your PNG, JPG, and GIF images to WebP and AVIF (to improve search rankings)
- Optimize every image on your website, including featured images and thumbnails
- Resize image uploads automatically to fit your website’s dimensions without requiring manual resizing
- Depending on file size and quality, you can choose between lossy, lossless, and glossy compression
See the complete list of features here.
Pricing
- ShortPixel (Free Version) – 100 free credits monthly
- ShortPixel (Pro Version) – Starts at $9.99/month
9. Smush
Smush isn’t just an image-compression plugin. In addition to optimizing images, Smush helps speed up WordPress websites and improve SEO rankings through its lazy load function (and by resizing images).
Smush allows you to:
- Bulk compress up to 50 images with one click
- Perform lossless image compression (i.e., compression without quality reduction)
- Search your media library to reveal images slowing down your website
- Reduce the sizes of your large images automatically (to a fixed maximum width/height)
- Optimize images in multiple formats, including GIF, JPEG, and PNG
- Enable the lazy load function to make your website load faster
See the complete list of features here.
Pricing
- Smush (Lite Version) – Free
- Smush (Pro Version) – Starts at $6/month
10. EWWW Image Optimizer
EWWW IO is a WordPress plugin you can use to optimize your images to increase page load time, reduce bounce rate, and improve your website’s SEO rankings.
With EWWW IO, you can optimize both your older uploads and newly uploaded images.
EWWW IO allows you to:
- Optimize your photos (of varying image sizes) without restrictions
- Compress images of different formats, including JPEG, PNG, GIF, and WebP
- Retain the quality of your pictures even after compression
- Optimize all images on your website, including ones that aren’t in the media library
See the complete list of features here.
Pricing
- EWWW IO (Lite Version) – Free
- EWWW IO (Pro Version) – Starts at $7/month
Managing Your Photos Just Got Easier
It’s surprising how easy photo management can be when you have the right tools.
Unlike before, you no longer have to spend hours organizing photos on your WordPress website.
You also no longer have to suffer from a slow-loading website or hire a developer to help you create a stylish photo gallery.
The plugins above are here to your rescue!
So, go set all your photo management tasks on autopilot, and then use the additional time to grow your business.