Simple Photo Gallery is a WordPress gallery plugin from Tips and Tricks HQ. I have gotten to know Ruhul Amin well as I have written some articles for him in the past (such as How to Protect Your WordPress Website with All In One WP Security).
Simple Photo Gallery is a gallery plugin that has some interesting features. It only has a few basic setting pages so is very easy to configure.
The general settings page allows you to define the order of gallery items. You can arrange items by ascending and descending order by ID, date, and name. The plugin uses a dedicated page for your gallery and for your albums. All you have to do is create a new page in WordPress for each and then insert the shortcode that is provided to you (via the “More Info” link).
By default, the admin area of the plugin can only be viewed by administrators. Through the advanced settings area, you can reduce the permission level to editors, authors, and contributors. This is important if your staff help you maintain your gallery.
It only takes a minute to set up a new gallery. You can name your gallery, choose from one of thumbnail templates, define the number of thumbnails per page, and enable pagination.
Text watermarks can be applied to images dynamically to each photo uploaded to a gallery. The position and opacity of the watermark can be defined. You can also change the font size.
Once you have configured your gallery, you can upload your images using the WordPress media manager. This allows you to upload new images or select images that have already been uploaded to your website.
Multiple galleries can be grouped together and displayed in albums. The name of the album, the thumbnail, and the order in which galleries are displayed, can all be configured.
If you wish, the album and gallery shortcodes can be placed on the same page; though it probably makes more sense to use different pages for each so that visitors do not get confused which is which.
Both albums and galleries have the same styling. I think it would be good if they could be distinguished some way as it not instantly clear that a thumbnail link is for a gallery or for an album. It would be better if the album thumbnail also denoted details such as the number of images in the gallery.
By default, previous and next photo links are displayed under images. I initially believed that the plugin does not use a lightbox to display images, however this can be enabled in the gallery settings area by enabling “Preview Photo Via Page”. Once lightbox is enabled, you can navigate images using arrow keys.
There is also a link to return to the main gallery as well so that you can return to the main gallery list.
I was really impressed with how well the watermark function works. The plugin allows you to go back into your gallery settings at any time and adjust the watermark settings. This allows you to change the watermark until you find a position, size, and opacity, that you are happy with.
Simple Photo Gallery is a basic photo gallery that is useful for organising images into galleries and galleries into albums.
The plugin lacks a lot of features that other gallery plugins offer, however this was clearly by design. It was designed for those that do not need a lot of bells and whistles.
The plugin does include an option for watermarking. This is, in my opinion, what sets it apart from other basic gallery solutions and what makes it a good alternative to the default WordPress gallery that is built into WordPress.
If you are looking for an advanced gallery plugin, you may want to look elsewhere, however I recommend checking it out if you want to watermark your photographs, or if you want a functional way of organising all of your images.
Thanks,
Kevin