20 WordPress Plugins for Your Photography Website

By Nancy Young. in WordPress. Updated on October 18, 2022.

A photography website, blog and portfolio are one of the most complicated web mediums owing to the large amount of visual content they represent. However, WordPress is known for being the most effective CMS for photographers and there is a good reason for that. There are so many image-based plugins and features in WordPress that make it so easy to upload and manage photo content.

In this list, I have collected 20 the best free and useful WordPress plugins for photographers which will help you to compress your images without losing quality, secure your website from hacks, tell stories with your images, optimize your site for SEO and more.

AccessPress Pinterest

Pinterest is a popular social media website that works on image uploading and sharing. Pinterest is also a great source of traffic through its visual content. So, if you want people to easily add photos from your site on Pinterest, you need AccessPress Pinterest plugin allowing you to add ‘Pin It’ button to your images, add Pinterest profile widget and follow buttons on your site, and insert recent Pinterest feed.

EWWW Image Optimizer

The loading speed of your website not only affects your SEO but can also make your visitors leave if it takes too long to load. EWWW Image Optimizer is an amazing WordPress plugin which lets you increase website speed by optimizing the images. It also will save your storage space, and convert your photos in the best file format.

Storyform

Storyform plugin will help you turn your blog posts into an interesting narrative with images. The plugin has responsive layout. You can add full-screen content, huge photography, background video, typography, different columns, captions, animations and more options to make your articles attractive. Your visitors can navigate the posts with mouse or keyboard.

Easy Watermark

Online theft is a common problem for all photographers who share their images online. You can protect yourself in advance with a watermark. But instead of adding watermark on each image manually, this simple plugin can do so automatically when you upload them to your WordPress site.

Image Widget

Originally, WordPress dashboard comes with a text widget. Of course, you can add image widget using it, but you need to add HTML code to make these images look nice. With Image Widget plugin you can use native WordPress panel to add images to your site and drag and drop images to the widget-ready area.

WP Media Tagger

The native WordPress panel does not allow you to properly sort out your images and other files you upload. For photography site with a big number of images, it’s a real issue. WP Media Tagger lets you add categories and tags to the images and other media files. This makes it easier to browse and find necessary files.

Post Thumbnail Editor

WordPress dashboard has a complicated system of cropping thumbnail images. Usually, it crops the image right at the center, and sometimes it may cut the important part of the image. Post Thumbnail Editor is a real solution for this small issue. The plugin gives you an ability to manually fix the thumbnails.

Media Library Assistant

The plugin provides a few useful additional features for your WordPress media library. It goes with custom shortcodes to add a gallery to the site. Using this plugin, you can also browse your media files, search for a particular file, display files on the basis of taxonomy, and integrate the plugin with native WP media library.

Sell Media

Sell Media ia a simple WordPress plugin that helps you see different files right from your website, for example, photos, videos, ebooks, albums, licenses to your photos, prints and more. The integration with PayPal goes by default in the plugin, but you can also integrate it with MailChimp, for example. Sell Media will work with any WordPress theme with an accurate code.

NextGEN Gallery

NextGEN Gallery has over one million active installs and was designed back in 2007. These numbers speak for themselves as it is the most popular gallery WordPress plugin. You can batch upload, edit metadata and sort your images to create a gallery. If you have any questions about this plugins, you can read their FAQ and see screenshots of galleries.

Meta Slider

With over 800 thousand active installs, MetaSlider is a popular WordPress plugin allowing you to create a simple unique SEO-optimized slider in no time. Using this plugin you can create a slideshow with different types, designs, and layouts to fit your website.

SEO Friendly Images

It’s important to add proper Alt and Title attributes to your HTML code when you upload images to your website. SEO Friendly Images helps you to authomatically update the images with proper attributes. It’s pretty simple, just activate the plugin and it will do the rest of the work for you.

Imsanity

Usually, photo sites have a lot of images with huge sizes. It may slow down your site and even affect the SEO. Instead of compressing your images one by one manually, use Imsanity plugin. It will compress images right before uploading on the site without losing quality automatically. So, you can free yourself from the headache of compressing images forever.

Lazy Load

Since photography websites are heavy on images, they slow down the overall performance of your site. This simple Lazy Load plugin will improve the loading time of your web pages. Just upload the plugin to your WordPress dashboard and activate it.

Booking Calendar

Websites of professional photographers who sell their servcie online need not only contact form, but also an ability to book appointments online. Booking Calendar will help you to enable booking services on your site. It has an intuitive design so your visitors can book your services easily.

Smush Image Compression and Optimization

Smush Image Compression and Optimization is a free award-winning WordPress plugin for photographers, bloggers, and other creatives who have a lot of images on their sites. It will help you to optimize, compress, and resize your photos in no time. You can also reduce file size without losing quality

Image Watermark

Image Watermark plugin speaks for its name. It’s a free watermark plugin that I think is quite intuitive. This plugin will add a watermark to every image you upload on your site. This way you will be able to prevent image theft which is a common problem for online era.

Photography Management

Photography Management is a useful WordPress plugins which allows you to organize your clients’ information in a secure and easy way. You can upload your photos and password protect them, so only the people who have password can have access to these images.

Sunshine Photo Cart

Sunshine Photo Cart is a free helpful WordPress client proofing gallery and photo cart plugin allowing you to sell prints online. Users can choose photo or any other digital product, add it to the cart and purchase it. It enables both online and offline payments without comissions.