How to Create a WordPress Video Gallery (Beginner’s Guide)

by Southie Williamson on Dec 13, 2023 Reader Disclosure

You may already be familiar with using an image gallery on your website, but do you know how to create a WordPress video gallery?

Whether your videos are uploaded on YouTube, Vimeo, or inside your WordPress site, you can easily create a gallery to neatly showcase them and engage visitors.

In this article, we will show you how to create a WordPress video gallery with thumbnails using the best WordPress video plugin available. Ready to get started?

Can You Put Videos on WordPress?

Yes, you can put videos on WordPress! Just like adding photos, adding videos is pretty simple. With just a few clicks your audience can enjoy your videos right there on your website. WordPress allows you to add videos to posts, pages, and widget areas like the sidebar.

That said, WordPress doesn’t provide the tools or templates for creating a gallery layout of your videos. So, if you want to create video galleries that allow visitors to seamlessly browse your WordPress video library, you’ll want to use a plugin.

Where Are Videos Stored in WordPress?

If you upload your video files directly to your WordPress site, they’re stored in your Media Library. However, we don’t recommend adding videos this way. WordPress isn’t optimized to host and play videos, so if you upload a bunch of videos directly it’ll often cause slow load times and a bad user experience.

Instead, we recommend uploading videos to a hosting platform like YouTube or Vimeo. That way, you can simply embed videos individually or in a gallery without worrying about your site speed and performance.

Why Create a Video Gallery in WordPress?

Creating a video gallery in WordPress gives you a neat and organized way to showcase your videos. It’s a smart move because:

• User-Friendly: Visitors can easily find and watch your videos in one place. Instead of hunting around your site for scattered videos, they can simply scroll through and choose which ones to play.
• Looks Professional: A gallery looks clean and professional. It gives a polished vibe to your website, making it more appealing.
• Boosts Engagement: People like visuals. A gallery encourages visitors to stay longer, watch more videos, and engage more with your content. A video gallery for your online store is also a major way to boost conversions and better showcase products.
• Improves Organization: If you have different types of videos, galleries can help you organize them for visitors. For example, you could use a video gallery for all your tutorials and a different gallery for all your vlogs.

Now that you know a little more about WordPress video galleries, let’s see how to create one!

How to Add a WordPress Video Gallery

1. Install Envira Gallery

Envira Gallery is the best premium WordPress gallery plugin, allowing you to create beautiful image and video galleries. It has an easy drag-and-drop builder and multiple layout templates including slideshow, fullscreen, grid, masonry, lightbox display, and more to make creating a stunning galleries effortless.

With Envira Gallery, you can create galleries that include both images and videos, and the plugin works with self-hosted videos or videos from other sources including YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram, Twitch, Facebook, Daily Motion, Wistia, VideoPress, and more.

Check out more popular features that make Envira Gallery the best all-in-one video gallery plugin:

• Lightbox popup display for playing videos or viewing images.
• Albums to organize and manage galleries.
• Filterable galleries and albums using tags.
• Ability to start a video at a particular min/sec from any YouTube video.
• Social sharing buttons.
• Control over download options, watermarking, and password-protected galleries.
• Integration with popular page builders like Elementor and Beaver Builder.
• And lots more!

To get started, head to Envira Gallery’s pricing page and grab the license that works best for you. You’ll need the Pro license or above to create video galleries.

After that, you need to download the plugin’s ZIP file and install and activate Envira Gallery on your WordPress website. If you’re not familiar with adding plugins to WordPress, you can check out this tutorial for help.

Upon activating the plugin, you need to add your license key (you can find it in your account area or confirmation email after purchase). Then, head to Envira Gallery » Settings from your WordPress admin menu. Paste your license key and press Verify Key.

2. Activate the Videos Addon

After the license verification, you need to go to the Envira Gallery » Addons tab to install and activate the addon for creating video galleries. Find Videos Addon in the list of addons and click the Install button.

Once it finishes installing, the button will change to say Activate. Click to Activate it and wait for the status to turn green.

After the Videos addon is activated, you’re ready to learn how to create a WordPress gallery with thumbnails and videos.

3. Create a New Video Gallery

Now that you’ve installed and activated the Videos addon, let’s see how to make a gallery with videos in WordPress.

First, go to Envira Gallery » Add New to create a new video gallery. Go ahead give your new gallery a name in the Add title field.

Click Select Files from Other Sources in the upload box.

Now, a popup will appear for you to add media from other sources. Click Insert Videos on the left side.

From here, you can add videos to your gallery, title them, and add an optional meta data. To upload self-hosted videos click Upload Media. Otherwise, simply paste the Video URL where it’s hosted such as from your YouTube channel.

You can add additional videos to your gallery by clicking the Add Video button. After adding the videos you want, click Insert into Gallery at the bottom.

Envira Gallery will now automatically get the YouTube video thumbnails (or those from other sources) to make your video gallery presentable. After the popup closes, scroll down to see the videos in your gallery.

Pro Tip: If you want to use a YouTube playlist, you’ll first need to get a YouTube API and enter it in your Envira settings. Check out our documentation to learn how to do that.

Next up, we’ll show you how to customize your WordPress video gallery.

4. Customize Your WordPress Video Gallery

You can drag the thumbnails to rearrange their order. If you’d like to edit any of the videos in your gallery, click the blue pencil icon on any thumbnail.

This will show a popup where you can edit the title or caption and customize things like showing black bars or not when the video plays, forcing custom dimensions, and changing the default thumbnail to a different poster image.

Using the tabs in the menu on the left, you can customize your gallery layout under Configuration and edit other settings to your liking.

Go ahead and click the Videos tab. From there, you can change settings for things like volume controls, autoplay videos, video time, video download controls, video play controls, caption display, progress bar, and more.

There’s quite a few setting here. We won’t go into all of them, but after you’re satisfied with all the settings, make sure to press Save Draft in the top right.

Congrats, you learned how to create a WordPress video gallery. All that’s left is publishing it!

5. Publish Your WordPress Video Gallery

It’s time to add your video gallery to your website! Go ahead and press the Publish button. Your video gallery is live, but there are a couple of different ways to embed your gallery in a post or page. Let’s take a look at both.

Insert Your Video Gallery Using a Shortcode

First, on the right side of the screen, just below the publish/update button you’ll see a shortcode menu for your video gallery. You can copy (clipboard icon) the top shortcode and then insert it anywhere on your site.

In the shortcode menu you’ll also see other codes for inserting a shortcode that links to your gallery or placing your gallery in your WordPress theme with a template tag.

Add Your Video Gallery with the Block Editor

Aside from shortcodes, you can also use Envira’s native Gutenberg block to add your gallery with the WordPress block editor. After publishing the video gallery, simply go to a new or existing post/page where you want to display your video gallery.

From the page or post, click + to add a new block and search for the Envira Gallery block. Click it when you see it.

From there, just use the search bar to look up the name of your new video gallery or select it from the dropdown list.

Once inserted, click Publish.

6. View Your Website’s Video Gallery

Whether you used a shortcode or the block editor to embed your video gallery on a page or post, it’s time to view it! Just go to your website’s page where it’s inserted to see how your layout, videos, and thumbnails look to visitors.

Click on any of the videos to see your WordPress video gallery with a thumbnail playlist in action!

That’s it! You learned how to create a WordPress video gallery with lightbox popup and thumbnails. Now, go wild with all of the videos galleries you can create from YouTube and other sources!

Not using Envira Gallery? Get started today!

If you enjoyed learning how to add a WordPress video gallery to your website, you may also want to check out our guide on How to Add Image Deep Linking to WordPress Gallery Photos.

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