Favorite Plugins- part two

Here are five more plugins I have used and can recommend.

Many of my clients are artists or creatives who require a portfolio showing their work. Showing a number of images can be accomplished in several ways: a gallery, a slideshow or a simple scrolling display. WordPress already has a powerful and slick gallery capacity and if possible I like to use it in combination with a plugin. Here are some image plugins that have performed well for me..

JQuery Masonry Image Gallery

This plugin creates a masonry image gallery from a simple wordpress gallery. Masonry is a JavaScript grid layout library. It works by placing elements in optimal position based on available vertical space, sort of like a mason fitting stones in a wall. It maximizes the usage of screen space of galleries containing items with varying heights. See it in action here

Meteor Slides

My go-to, simple slideshow plugin that creates responsive slideshows. Easy to use and customize. You can create multiple slideshows and show them via a shortcode or as a widget.

Crelly Slider

If you need a fancier slideshow with overlays and animations and transitions, this is a great one to use. I have found it to be compatible with more themes and other plugins than a number of premium slideshow plugins I have tested. It is free to download at WordPress.org.  See it in action here

Royal Slider

This premium plugin creates touch enables slideshows that work really well for phones and tablets. It is very customizable, you can include html and video in the slides or make the slider full-width. It is responsive and easily adapts to all screen sizes, including phones and tablets. The interface and controlls take some getting used to, but once it is set up it performs flawlessly. One feature I like is the option to create a sample slideshow and use this as a template for all wordpress galleries in the site. The price for this plugin in $23 at CodeCanyon.

WP Gallery Custom Links

Sometimes images in a WordPress gallery need to be linked to unique URLs and as of this writing WordPress galleries does not have the capability to do that. This plugin allows linking of each image in a gallery to a unique destination URL. It was very helpful for me at this site where I had a large gallery of logos that needed to be linked to their respective company sites.