Few days ago a friend of mine asked me a WordPress portfolio plugin he could use for his works. I had not a ready answer in my pocket, probably because the only right answer is “it depends”!
Yes, it depends. There are few things you have to consider:
- what kind of grid do you like to have for your gallery?
- how many works do you want to show?
- would you accept cropped images?
- what do you want to happen when the user click on an image?
- should the gallery be responsive?
These questions are vital to understand the kind of gallery you’re looking for your portfolio. Let’s see why I asked these questions.
Purposes of a gallery plugin
To this day there are a lot, and I mean a lot, of WordPress galleries. You have galleries for any taste but how many of them have a purpose?
We (gallery developers) often focus only on features and cool effects, and that’s fine, but we usually don’t think about the purpose of the gallery we’re making. When I started to make WordPress galleries I didn’t care that much if the gallery I was creating could be good for a wedding album or a portfolio plugin. After few years I’m now aware that the all-purpose-gallery simply does not exist. That’s why I experimented with code and grids until I was able to cover as many purposes as possible.
I created two complementary gallery plugins: Final Tiles Grid Gallery and Mikado Grid Gallery.
Fixed Vs Variable Gallery Size
The first gallery I made is Final Tiles Grid Gallery. The aim of this gallery was to use images without limits on size and aspect ratio. The images would have been placed like a mosaic but with tiles of any size. The aspect ratio is kept but if the image doesn’t fit in its spot it can be scaled.
This kind of grid is, as far as I know, quite unique and no other plugins currently let you do that. So what are the main points of this gallery?
- it uses images of any size
- it scales images when needed
- it grows vertically
- you can stick a width but you cannot stick an height (because of previous point)
- it doesn’t crop images
Here you can see an example of a gallery made with this plugin:
Clik here to view.
Final Tiles Grid Gallery for WordPress example
as you can see you have images thats span on 2 or more “columns”, images are of different sizes and aspect ratios.
Opposite to this kind of grid is Mikado Grid Gallery. Why do I say “opposite”? Because, as explained, Final Tiles Grid Gallery has a vertical growth, the more images you add the higher the gallery will be.
Mikado works very differently. In Mikado you can set a fixed width and height, so if you choose to have a rectangle of 800×500 pixels you know the gallery will always have that size, regardless of the number of images.
Mikado doesn’t have “columns” or “rows”, just like Final Tiles. The main points to consider when using Mikado are:
- it crops images
- it creates a random grid
- you can stick width and height
This is an example of a gallery made with Mikado:
Clik here to view.
An example of a gallery made with Mikado Grid Gallery
Again, you don’t see any “column” or “row”. The gallery is completely random and changes each time you reload the page.
To crop or not to crop
Some galleries crop images some other don’t. The point here is: is it ok for you if your gallery shows cropped images? It’s not a simple decision. Some photographers, for example, don’t want to show cropped images for any reason. In that case Final Tiles would be the best choice, considering my products.
Sometime the problem is not related to what the photographer wants but if a photo still looks good when cropped. For example, portraits usually cannot be cropped because if a face is cut the photo is no more a portrait. But cropping a photo of a landscape could be not that bad.
So, as you can see it can’t exist a “WordPress portfolio plugin”. It would be just a gallery like many other. It’s what YOU need that can make a gallery good for a portfolio.
Related info & sites:
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