Creating picture galleries has been part of WordPress for a number of years. With the block editor, you’ll be able to have a nice-looking gallery in only a few minutes. Nevertheless, if you wish to do extra than simply lay out pictures in a grid, you want a plugin.
There are various on the market, however on this put up, we’re going to check two of the perfect choices available on the market: Modula vs Envira.
At naked minimal, an excellent gallery plugin for WordPress goes to have to supply an expert format. Going past the grid, there are various extra options that may increase the performance and look of your gallery. It additionally must be straightforward to make use of.
Each Modula and Envira present options that make them versatile and strong choices, however we examined them side-by-side to see which supplied the perfect mixture of performance, versatility, and look.
Let’s begin with Envira.
Envira Gallery has been within the WordPress plugin market since 2014. With 2.5M downloads, it’s additionally very talked-about.
Set up
You possibly can set up Envira Gallery Lite out of your WordPress dashboard by navigating to Plugins>Add New and trying to find “Envira.” You can too obtain the premium model from the Envira web site.
Getting Began with Envira
After you have Envira Gallery activated, you’ll see it seem in your WordPress admin sidebar. Simply click on Add New to start creating your first gallery.
As with most galleries, you’ll be able to both drag and drop your pictures or open a window to pick them out of your laptop.
After you have some pictures loaded up, you can begin customizing your gallery utilizing the tabs on the left. For instance, within the Config menu, you’ll be able to select the variety of columns in your grid. There’s additionally an choice for Lazy Loading, which is a must have for any gallery plugin.
Beneath the Lightbox Tab, there are alternatives for choosing a theme, picture dimension, and caption place. In the event you depend on having a lightbox function in your gallery, these are crucial choices to have.
The opposite tab menu choices embrace:
- Cellular
- Movies
- Social
- Tags
- Pagination
- Misc
Beneath Misc, you’ll be able to enter customized CSS lessons and there’s an choice for right-to-left language assist. We’ll cowl the opposite menus in our subsequent part.
Including your Envira gallery to a web page or put up is so simple as selecting a block or utilizing a shortcode.
Envira Premium Options
Envira affords some tremendous helpful and highly effective options with a premium subscription.
Cellular
Not solely are you able to create mobile-responsive galleries, there’s a setting that lets you select completely different layouts for cellular and desktop.
Movies
You’ve gotten the flexibility so as to add your self-hosted movies, in addition to movies on different platforms. Envira integrates along with your accounts at DailyMotion, YouTube, Vimeo, and plenty of extra.
Social
This can be a useful function that provides buttons to your pictures so your customers can share them on social media.
Tags
Add tags to your images and permit customers to filter them as they view your gallery.
Pagination is nice for bettering web page load occasions. It additionally helps with group, particularly in case you have lots of pictures in your gallery.
Envira additionally offers lots of Addons for his or her plugin, reminiscent of Albums, Themes, Downloads, and extra.
Envira Pricing
Envira Gallery Lite is free to make use of and set up. Pricing for Premium options begins at $26/12 months and goes as much as $269 for a one-time Lifetime buy.
It’s straightforward to start out utilizing Envira Gallery proper of the bat, and one can see why it’s on the high of the WordPress gallery plugin market.
Newer to the WordPress plugin market, Modula is nonetheless gaining lots of traction attributable to its customizability and pace.
Set up
You possibly can set up Modula Gallery out of your WordPress dashboard by navigating to Plugins>Add New and trying to find “Modula .” You can too obtain it from the official WordPress Plugin web page, or go straight to the premium model on the Modula web site.
Getting Began with Modula
With Modula put in, navigate to the menu in your admin sidebar. Once more, you’ve gotten the choice of dragging your pictures into the window or choosing from a folder.
You’ll discover the acquainted grid format widespread to all gallery plugins. Nevertheless, Modula has a trick up its sleeve. By grabbing the nook of a picture, you’ll be able to change the dimensions and facet ratio. As you enlarge a picture, the remainder of the grid adjusts in real-time to permit for the brand new spacing.
This one function was lots of enjoyable to play with and admittedly throughout analysis far more time was spent than vital adjusting pictures simply to see the grid adapt.
Included with the free model of Modula are some fundamental and not-so-basic options, like:
- Lightbox & Hyperlinks
- Captions
- Social Sharing
- Loading Results
- Hover Results
- Model
- Cellular Responsive settings
- Customized CSS
As with Envira, including your gallery to a web page or put up is so simple as selecting a block or getting into a shortcode. There may be additionally a Modula widget in case you’re utilizing Elementor in your layouts.
Modula Premium Options
Filters
Right here you’ll be able to add your individual phrases for filtering pictures, with loads of choices for selecting how they seem on the web page.
Video
Much like Envira, you should use self-hosted movies or embed them from different platforms. There are additionally choices for Autoplay and importing a customized Play button icon.
Velocity Up
This contains Lazy Load, however there are additionally choices to set compression for thumbnails and lightbox individually.
EXIF
This function shows EXIF info out of your digital camera within the lightbox.
Obtain
In order for you customers to save lots of your pictures to their computer systems, you’ll be able to allow this function. Amongst different settings, you’ll be able to even specify the identify of the zip file.
Zoom
This lets you set the kind of zoom allowed within the lightbox.
Misc
Beneath Misc, you’ll be able to allow safety from right-click downloading and activate Deeplinking, which creates distinctive URLs for every picture, serving to with search engine optimisation.
Slideshow
Simply because it sounds, you’ll be able to arrange lightbox slideshow performance.
Cross Shield
A helpful function for galleries you need to present privately. You may make your gallery password-protected.
Watermark
This features a useful function that saves the unique picture, in case you need to take away the watermark later.
The Modula Gallery plugin additionally comes with a migration software, which lets you simply transfer your gallery from different gallery plugins to Modula.
Modula Pricing
As with Envira, Modula is free to put in and use, with Premium options below a subscription. The Starter tier is simply $39/12 months and ranges to $99/12 months for Enterprise, their highest tier.
Modula vs Envira Aspect-By-Aspect Comparability
Now that we’ve coated every plugin in some element, let’s do a fast comparability of a few of the options:
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Our Suggestion: Modula
Each plugins had been straightforward to make use of and carried out nicely. Whereas the side-by-side comparability desk reveals some additional options from Modula, the clear and fashionable UX actually pushed it forward. As well as, the flexibility to pull pictures to vary their dimension and alter the gallery format are game-changers.
Whereas Envira is a stable gallery plugin with an excellent chunk of the market, Modula is constructed with some options that we really feel places it forward of the competitors.
Which gallery plugin did you decide? Tell us why within the feedback beneath.
