Envira Gallery Review: Is It Worth It? (Full Overview of ALL Features)

Last updated on Sep 25, 2024 by Southie Williamson Reader Disclosure

Want to know if Envira is the right WordPress plugin for you? In this Envira Gallery review, we’ll explore how the plugin can make your site more visually appealing and what its features can do to help you decide if Envira Gallery is the best WordPress gallery plugin for your website.

By the end of this article, you’ll understand Envira Gallery’s features, benefits, costs, and how it measures up against other gallery plugins.

What is Envira Gallery?

Envira Gallery is a photo gallery plugin that helps users create responsive, visually appealing image and video galleries on WordPress. Using its drag-and-drop builder, you can upload and arrange images, customize gallery layouts, and enable lightboxes. It also offers advanced features like social sharing, dynamic galleries, and SEO enhancements. The plugin is fast, powerful, and easy to use, allowing you to upload content and create a highly functional gallery in less than 5 minutes.

“The trick to making difficult things easy is to keep the easy things still easy. Envira makes everything easy. If you’ve struggled with WordPress gallery plugins that take video tutorials to learn, you’re going to love Envira.” – Chris Lema, Vice President of Products & Innovation at Liquid Web

Envira Gallery Review: Features & Benefits

Envira provides tons of features and addons to extend it’s functionality. Let’s take a look at everything this image gallery plugin offers.

1. Responsive and Mobile-Friendly Galleries

It’s essential that your image galleries load at the correct size on various devices. More than half of web traffic comes from mobile nowadays, so your images must be sharp, crisp, and clear on all screen sizes. That’s where responsive images, which automatically resize to display correctly on different screen sizes, come into play.

In the past, achieving responsive media meant adding lines of CSS code to your WordPress theme. That’s fine if you know how to code, but otherwise, you’d have to spend hours learning how to do it yourself or pay someone to do it for you. With Envira Gallery, though, you don’t have to add any code to achieve perfectly responsive galleries.

Envira Gallery adapts your display settings and generates a dynamic, mobile-friendly gallery layout for users on any device. That way, visitors never see pixelated, distorted versions of your content!

2. Easy and Customizable Galleries

Building a gallery in WordPress can be frustrating and complicated, but Envira Gallery makes it easy. The plugin features a simple drag-and-drop builder to make creating galleries more intuitive. Plus, you get a degree of control over your image gallery that WordPress alone simply can’t give you.

Gallery Templates

As you probably know, the default WordPress photo gallery layout is pretty underwhelming. That’s why Envira offers pre-made gallery templates designed to present your images in the best possible format. You can choose from many customizable layouts such as grid, masonry, mosaic, square, blogroll, polaroid, and more.

Videos

While Envira is excellent for creating image galleries, that’s not all it does. The Videos Addon allows you to showcase video content within your galleries. You can:

• Embed Videos from Multiple Sources: Add videos from popular platforms like YouTube (including playlists), Vimeo, Wistia, Twitch, VideoPress, DailyMotion, or self-hosted videos, and display them within a gallery.
• Responsive Video Galleries: Just like with images, the plugin ensures that your video galleries are fully responsive and optimized for all devices.
• Customize Video Settings: You can control how your videos appear in the lightbox and gallery, including autoplay and display settings like volume controls and progress bars, for maximum flexibility.

Gallery Themes

Gallery Themes is a handy addon that lets you choose from various lightbox and gallery styles to customize the look in 1 click. It’s excellent for quickly selecting a design that matches the style of your site without much manual configuration.

Built-in Lightbox

The plugin includes a built-in lightbox, which you can customize by enabling thumbnails for navigation, displaying captions, applying a lightbox theme, and more.

In addition, the Supersize Lightbox Images feature allows you to display full-size, RAW photos without the risk of WordPress resizing, which can cause distortion and pixelation. It’s especially valuable for photographers who want to showcase the finest details of their work in pristine quality.

3. Galleries Optimized for Speed

WordPress images and videos that load quickly and look great are more important than ever in today’s high-speed digital world. Research shows that most users will click another website if your site doesn’t load within 3 seconds, and Google also uses page load time as an SEO ranking factor.

Optimizing your images is necessary, as non-optimized galleries can significantly reduce your page load speed. Luckily, the Envira Gallery plugin was created with performance in mind. As one of the fastest WordPress gallery plugins available, the plugin ensures that all galleries are optimized from the start. It also includes several optional features to improve the load time and user experience.

Lazy Loading

Lazy loading is a must for galleries with hundreds or even thousands of images. This feature is built into Envira Gallery to ensure images are only loaded as the user scrolls down the page, which reduces initial load times and provides a smoother experience for visitors.

Image Compression

Large image files can slow down your website, negatively impacting load times and user experience. Envira Gallery helps you avoid these issues with its built-in Image Compression feature. By automatically compressing images, you can ensure your galleries load quickly without compromising on visual quality.

Pagination

Envira Gallery’s Pagination Addon allows you to break your gallery into multiple pages. This improves page load speed and makes it easier for visitors to browse extensive collections without getting overwhelmed.

4. SEO-Friendly Galleries

As a website owner, you likely spend a lot of time working on SEO to improve your site’s rankings and drive more traffic. Envira Gallery offers powerful tools to help you make an SEO-friendly image gallery that’s easily shareable.

Standalone Galleries

The Standalone Galleries feature allows you to assign galleries their own URL, meaning you can easily share your galleries directly or link to them on social media. Simply enable the standalone option and customize the URL slug. From there, the plugin automatically generates unique URLs for your galleries.  

Deeplinking and Schema Markup

The Deeplinking Addon extends the functionality by creating unique anchor links for individual images within a gallery (e.g., yoursite.com/gallery/#image1). Aside from making it easy to direct users to specific pictures, this optimizes your image gallery for SEO since each image is now discoverable by search engines.

To further improve image SEO, the addon also adds schema markup, including:

• Image caption for added context
• Publish date to inform search engines when the image was posted
• Copyright license and holder (if the Image Licensing feature is enabled)
• Image location (if the EXIF Addon is enabled and location data is available)

5. Protected Photos and Galleries

Image theft is a serious concern if you post your photography or artwork online. Fortunately, Envira offers a range of tools to protect your images from being stolen while increasing brand awareness with watermarking.

Watermarking

The Watermarking Addon allows you to easily add a custom watermark (text or image) to gallery images while preserving the originals. That way, your work is branded and protected, but the original files are intact and available if needed.

Image Protection

The Protection Addon disables right-click downloading, which prevents unauthorized users from easily saving your photos.

Image Licensing

You can easily display licensing information directly on your galleries to inform visitors about usage rights. Choose from various Creative Commons licenses and add an optional creator/author name. From there, galleries will automatically display your chosen license. The Image Licensing Addon is essential for photographers and artists who want to protect their work while encouraging proper use and attribution.

Password Protection

Lastly, the Password Protection Addon adds an extra layer of security. You can add a password to restrict access to individual galleries or albums, which is handy for client galleries or sensitive projects where privacy is essential.

6. Social Media Integration

Sharing your content across social media is essential for increasing visibility and engagement.

Social Sharing Buttons

The Social Sharing Addon allows you to add customizable sharing buttons directly to your galleries and lightboxes. Visitors can instantly share your photos via email, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, or WhatsApp, helping you expand your reach and increase traffic.

Instagram Addon

Envira Gallery also offers an Instagram Addon that seamlessly integrates your Instagram with WordPress. With this addon, you can display your Instagram photos in a beautiful, responsive gallery that matches your site’s design. It also lets you link the Instagram photos directly to increase your following and boost engagement.

8. Advanced Customizations and Functionality

Envira Gallery offers a variety of ways to customize your galleries beyond the basics, as well as powerful tools to help streamline the process of organizing, managing, and showcasing media—all while maintaining a user-friendly experience.

“When it comes to WordPress gallery plugins, Envira has no equal. Solid enough to do the job right, while flexible enough to handle any situation you can throw at it.” – Andrew Norcross, Founder of Reaktiv Studios

Animations

The Animations Addon brings your galleries to life with dynamic movement. You can choose from 50+ animations like fades, zooms, flips, and bounces to give your galleries a unique flair. The addon gives you control over timing, duration, and delays.

You can even combine animations with pagination to trigger an animation each time visitors click a new page in your gallery. It’s the perfect way to engage visitors with a creative touch.

Fullscreen and Zoom

These tools allow you to create an immersive, high-quality viewing experience for visitors. The Fullscreen Addon lets visitors view your images in full-screen mode directly from the lightbox. With the Zoom Addon, visitors can zoom in on your images to get a better look at specific details, such as textures and other intricate elements.

Albums and Breadcrumbs

Envira Gallery makes it easy to organize and display multiple galleries. With the Albums Addon, you can group multiple galleries into a single album, which is ideal for categorizing and showcasing large collections of images. From there, you can choose cover photos, customize the layout, add breadcrumbs for navigation, and more, giving you complete control over how your content is presented.

Scheduling

The Schedule Addon allows you to automate when specific content is shown on your site. Scheduling images, galleries, or albums to appear and disappear at specific times is as easy as checking a box and entering the start and end times. It’s ideal for managing and highlighting time-sensitive images such as seasonal photos, holiday sales, featured promotions, and contests or giveaways.

Tagging

Envira Gallery’s Tags Addon is a powerful tool for organizing your media library and creating a more interactive experience for visitors. By adding tags to your images, you can:

• Organize Your WordPress Media Library: Assign tags to images in your media library, making it easy to categorize and locate your photos.
• Build Dynamic Galleries Based on Tags: Automatically generate galleries that display all images associated with specific tags, ensuring your content is always fresh and relevant.
• Create Filterable Galleries: Display a list of tags above your gallery, allowing visitors to quickly filter galleries to find the content they’re most interested in.

Downloads and Printing

It’s easy to offer high-quality images for download or print with Envira Gallery. When enabled, the Downloads Addon lets you add a button allowing visitors to download images or an entire gallery. You can also password-protect your downloads, which makes it perfect for selling digital photos or sharing photos with clients.

Meanwhile, the Printing Addon adds convenience for visitors by letting you add a print button to images in both the gallery and lightbox view.

Dynamic and Featured Content Galleries

Envira Gallery provides two addons to streamline gallery management by automating content selection and display. They help you ensure your site features the most relevant and up-to-date images without having to manually update galleries.

• Dynamic Addon: Allows you to build galleries on the fly based on specific criteria, such as tags, categories, and other sources. For example, you could create a gallery from images attached to a specific post or page. Then, if you add new photos to the post, the dynamic gallery updates automatically.
• Featured Content Addon: Automatically generates galleries from specific WordPress content like blog posts, testimonials, products, or other custom post types. It’s perfect for showcasing featured content without manually creating and updating galleries.

Slideshows

Envira Gallery’s Slideshow Addon allows you to create smooth, automated slideshows that showcase your images in an engaging and dynamic way. You can easily customize the slideshow’s speed, transition effects, autoplay settings, and thumbnails, giving you complete control over how your pictures are presented to visitors.

Audio

To elevate the experience further, Envira Gallery also offers the Audio Addon. It allows you to add background music or narration to your slideshows and lightboxes. Whether you want to set the mood with music or provide commentary on your images, the audio feature adds an extra layer of immersion and professionalism to your galleries.

EXIF Data

The EXIF Addon is perfect for photographers who want to give their audience a deeper understanding of their work while maintaining an organized and professional gallery layout. You can easily showcase EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) metadata, like camera model, aperture, ISO, and shutter speed, below your images.

With control over which EXIF data is shown to visitors, it’s easy to keep your galleries clean and informative by only displaying the most relevant information.

Adobe Lightroom Integration

For photographers who rely on Lightroom for photo editing and management, Envira Gallery’s Lightroom Addon is a game-changer. This powerful addon lets you connect your Lightroom library with your WordPress galleries. You can:

• Publish Directly from Lightroom: No need to export and upload images manually. You can publish your galleries straight from Lightroom to your website with just a few clicks, streamlining the process.
• Sync Images Effortlessly: Automatically sync your Lightroom collections with Envira Gallery, ensuring that any updates you make in Lightroom—such as edits, deletions, or new additions—are instantly reflected in your WordPress galleries.
• Maintain High Quality: Envira Gallery preserves your image quality during the transfer, so your photos look just as stunning on your website as in Lightroom.

This integration is ideal for photographers who want to maintain a fast, professional Lightroom workflow while ensuring their online portfolio is always up to date.

Proofing

If you’re a photographer who regularly works with clients, the Proofing Addon offers an easy-to-use system for reviewing and approving photos. It allows you to create proofing galleries where clients can browse the images you’ve shared with them, pick their favorites, request sizes, select quantities, and add notes.

The Proofing Addon saves time for photographers and clients by eliminating the need for lengthy back-and-forth communication. You’ll have a completely integrated and streamlined photography workflow from editing to client delivery when you combine proofing with other Envira features like the Lightroom and Downloads addons.

More Features & Integrations

In addition to everything we’ve talked about above, here’s a quick rundown of the other features Envira Gallery offers:

• WooCommerce Addon: You can sell your photos directly from your galleries by integrating with WooCommerce for seamless eCommerce functionality.
• Permissions: Control user roles and permissions to manage who can create, edit, or delete galleries on your site.
• Defaults Addon: Save time by setting default configurations for new galleries, ensuring consistency and quicker gallery creation.
• CSS Addon: Lets you add custom CSS to your galleries to adjust appearance and styling without modifying core files.
• Integration with Popular Page Builders: Easily build and customize galleries using popular drag-and-drop page builders like Elementor and Beaver Builder.
• Dropbox and ZIP Importers: Import images directly from Dropbox into your galleries or upload entire image collections in one step using ZIP files.
• NextGEN Importer: Quickly import galleries from NextGEN Gallery into Envira for effortless migration.

So, are you ready to take your website visuals to the next level?

Get Envira Gallery Now →

Hopefully, by now, you’ve realized that Envira Gallery is way more than a basic gallery plugin. It’s an all-in-one solution for managing and showcasing your media.

Envira Gallery vs. Other WordPress Gallery Plugins

What sets Envira apart from other WordPress gallery plugins like FooGallery, NextGEN Gallery, and Modula? Let’s take a look!

Speed and Performance

As mentioned earlier, page loading speed is a huge factor in a website’s search rankings and overall success. Every nanosecond counts! In an independent test by WPBeginner, popular gallery plugins were tested using the same images and the default settings for each plugin. Check out the results:

Plugin	Page Size	Requests	Page Load Time
Envira Gallery	340ms	21	700 KB
FooGallery	358ms	27	705 KB
Modula Gallery	494ms	16	702 KB
NextGEN Gallery	876ms	35	850 KB

As you can see, Envira Gallery came out on top with a faster page loading time than any of the other plugins!

Ease-of-Use

Let’s face it — some WordPress plugins (and WordPress itself) can be difficult for beginners to navigate. Envira Gallery takes away the frustration, offering one of the most straightforward user interfaces to master. There’s a reason more than 3 million website owners—it’s beginner-friendly without sacrificing functionality.  

Streamlined Features

Many gallery plugins are bloated with extra features that most users will never use. Why make plugins more complicated than they need to be? Envira Gallery is different because it contains only the most essential features in the lightweight core plugin, with addons you can enable. These addons can be installed/uninstalled as needed, allowing you to add only the features you’ll use. This modular approach makes it faster and more user-friendly.

“Most WordPress gallery options are either too basic or require a PhD to figure out. For my clients, I need something that is easy to use yet powerful. Envira is the answer. Its straightforward approach means it is a breeze for my clients to quickly create galleries… Simply put, Envira is a great tool for everyone’s tool chest.” – Jared Atchison, WordPress Developer and Consultant

How Much Does Envira Gallery Cost?

Envira Gallery offers different price points depending on the included features and the number of sites, making it an affordable WordPress gallery plugin for both beginners and professionals. All plans offer a 14-day money-back guarantee, and the pricing structure is flexible; you can change plans or cancel renewals anytime. Here’s a brief overview of the pricing tiers:

Plan	# of Sites	Features	Annual Price
Basic	1	All gallery layouts and themes plus a few extra features like captions, slideshows, and right-click protection	Starts at $39.50
Plus	3	Everything in Basic + some premium addons like tagging, watermarking, featured content galleries, and password protection	Starts at $69.50
Pro	5	ALL Features and Addons	Starts at $99.50
Ultra	25	ALL Features and Addons	Starts at $199.50

You can see a full comparison of the plans on our pricing page.

“Not only is Envira exceptionally well built behind the scenes, it’s also exceptionally easy to use. It’s a perfect purchase for those who really want to get things done.” – Pippin Williamson, Founder at Easy Digital Downloads

Is There a Free Version of Envira Gallery?

Yes, a free version of Envira Gallery is available as the Envira Lite plugin. The Lite version offers basic features like drag-and-drop gallery creation and mobile-friendly designs, making it perfect for beginners or small-scale users. It lacks the advanced features and addons available in the paid versions, but you can always upgrade to a premium plan if you need more functionality.

Which Plan Is Right for You?

• Lite: Best for beginners who need free, basic gallery functionality and responsive design.
• Basic: Ideal for users who are just starting out but want more gallery layouts and customization options.
• Plus: Great for users looking for a balance between basic and advanced features, including premium addons like image tagging, watermarking, featured content galleries, and scheduling.
• Pro: Our most popular plan is great for photographers and businesses who want to get the most out of their galleries with advanced features like video support, albums, social sharing, proofing, and SEO enhancements.
• Ultra: Perfect for developers or agencies managing multiple sites and clients, with access to all features and priority support.

“I’ve been using Envira Gallery for a few years now, and it has been worth every penny – they are continually adding new features and improving the software, even 5 years after I started using it.” – GACREE, Envira Gallery Pro User

Does Envira Gallery Have Documentation and Support?

Yes! Envira Gallery provides extensive documentation and tutorials to help users get started quickly. The support team is responsive and offers assistance across all pricing tiers. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced developer, Envira’s resources make it easy to get the most out of the plugin. Have a question before purchasing? Let us know!

“Your instructions were terrific!!! Three hours later I was fully functional to a point where the gallery is no longer just an experiment. It is a keeper!!! Thanks for a fine product.” – William Graham, Envira Gallery Basic User

We hope you found this review of Envira Gallery helpful! Overall, Envira Gallery stands out as one of the best photo gallery plugins for WordPress, offering a perfect blend of features, performance, and ease of use.

Whether you’re a beginner looking for a simple gallery solution or a professional needing advanced functionality, Envira Gallery offers the flexibility to suit your needs. As you saw in this Envira Gallery, the plugin’s wide range of addons and integrations make managing and showcasing media effortless and highly customizable for any website.

Not using Envira Gallery? Get started today!

If you enjoyed this article, be sure to check out How to Manage & Add WordPress Custom Image Sizes.

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