FotoGrids 1.0 is out. It is the first public release of a WordPress gallery plugin we built for ourselves first.
The reason was ordinary enough. Every gallery we set out to build needed one more layout, one more control, or one more field than the free version in front of us offered. Some of that is fair — free tiers have to end somewhere. The ceiling just kept arriving earlier than the work did.
So FotoGrids was built around two questions: how much belongs in the free version, and how far one gallery can be adjusted without writing code. This release is the first answer to both.
Everything described below is in the free version, available today.
What FotoGrids 1.0 ships with
Eight gallery layouts come in the box: Grid, Masonry, Justified, Slider, Image Viewer, Single Item, Featured Item, and Instant Photos. Each one exists because a different kind of work needs it. A portfolio reads well as Justified. A product page usually wants Grid. A homepage hero is a Slider. If you are not sure which fits, the guide to choosing a layout walks through the decision.
Ready-made templates get a new gallery looking right in one click, and any gallery you style yourself can be saved as a template and reused on the next one.
Video sits next to the photos
A gallery is rarely only photographs. FotoGrids 1.0 takes video files from your Media Library and YouTube or Vimeo embeds, and places them in the grid alongside images. They play in the lightbox the same way. The docs cover Media Library video files and YouTube and Vimeo embeds separately, because they behave a little differently.
Albums, and a lightbox worth opening
Galleries group into albums without a limit, which is how most people actually work: one album per shoot, per collection, per listing.
The lightbox is full-screen and quiet. Arrow keys and swipe move between items, autoplay runs a slideshow, and social sharing sits in the corner rather than over the picture. Captions, descriptions, tags, people, and location travel with each image, so the detail view has something to say.
Keeping the work yours
Two things protect what you publish. Text watermarking burns a mark into the served image rather than laying it over the top in CSS. Password protection puts a gallery behind a password without a membership plugin. Both are documented — watermarks and password-protecting a gallery.
Built to be found and to load fast
Every gallery renders on the server. The markup a search engine sees is the markup a visitor sees, with real image tags, alt text, and captions in the HTML rather than assembled by JavaScript after the fact. Lazy loading holds back what is below the fold, and pagination keeps a thousand-image gallery from arriving all at once.
Sorting and on-page filtering let a visitor narrow a large gallery without leaving the page, and EXIF details show camera, lens, and settings for anyone who wants them. More of this sits on the SEO and performance features page.
Where FotoGrids 1.0 fits in your site
Gutenberg blocks and shortcodes cover the standard WordPress ways of placing a gallery. Widgets for Elementor and Divi cover the page builders. Building the gallery itself is drag-and-drop, and the admin is a React interface over a REST API, which matters if you plan to extend it — there is a walk-through of extending a gallery plugin on this blog.
View and share statistics are recorded in your own database, so you can see which galleries people actually open without sending anything to a third party.
We’re just getting started
There is more coming. The layouts, the lightbox, video, albums, templates, watermarking, password protection, and statistics are all in the free version from day one, and the roadmap shows what comes next.
If you build something with it, we would like to see it.