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4 WordPress Photo Proofing Plugin options and overall reviews from users.
If you’re a photographer and are setting up your WordPress website as a showcase for your work and creative endeavors, then having excellent photo management plugins are a must.
One of the main tasks that photographers have working with their WordPress websites is proofing their clients’ photos.
However, finding the ideal photo proofing plugin can be a bit of a challenge.
In this post, I’m going to go over the top 4 WordPress photo management plugin options for photo proofing that you can add to your website to make that job much easier.
I’m going to give each plugin an overall review summary based on the research I’ve done from users of these various WordPress plugins.
Then I will summarize my findings to tell you which WordPress photo management plugin offers the best photo proofing capabilities based on the reviews and research that I have conducted.
WordPress Gallery Plugin – NextGEN Gallery.
NextGen Gallery is easy to learn and their galleries look great.
If you’re a photographer and take your business to the next level up from 3rd party platforms and want their own site the NextGen Gallery is a must have for any photographer’s WordPress website.
Here are some of the highlights that users have made.
Pagination.
Nextgen is not only easy to use but offers great functionality, such as pagination, even on its free version.
Excellent plugin, a must for every photographer.
The free version of this plugin has gotten some rave reviews. If you have a WordPress photographer’s site you can do a lot of things with the free version.
However, the pro version has even more that’s even that much better.
This plugin just makes things so much easier as you can just import directly from Lightroom, create a gallery and away you go.
That means you can make a few quick edits in Lightroom, then create a proofing gallery that can be made on the fly to show clients in a matter of seconds.
That’s actually one of the best features with the lightroom plugin.
NextGen Gallery will save you so much time and effort, because it’s quick and easy to insert then upload and you’re done.
Photo Proofing Support.
The Pro Version (paid) has photo proofing support, a definite thumbs-up experience, if one of your main tasks as a photographer with their own WordPress is photo proofing your work with clients, their support can help you smooth out any rough patches in the experience.
picu – WordPress Photo Proofing Gallery.
Summary of Reviews:
Picu is another plugin that makes proofing really easy. You can host all your client galleries within your own WordPress website. Makes sense right? picu’s developers are always super helpful and are open to suggestions from their users.
Picu is an ideal solution for sharing imagery with clients and their free version is more than enough for many users.
The plugin works well and will help you keep customers engaged on your site. This is great for many reasons of which it will help your brand in SEO and your photography business’s overall branding. You can even accomplish all that in picu’s free version.
Customers can access their collection just by typing in their email address, it’s comfortable, user friendly and gives the customer a feeling of security and control about the information they provide on your site.
picu is really easy and intuitive. Their plugin development is quite active as well. The plugin seems to improve with every update.
Great support.
Although some have complained that this plugin completely ignores a theme’s design for integration.
As far as picu integrating with a theme’s design or lack thereof, they do this on purpose.
Picu wants to build a proofing solution that provides the best and easiest workflow possible for your clients, no matter which theme you are using.
With thousands of themes out there, and with varying code quality, it would be a ton of work, just to make it compatible with every theme out there.
So it’s practically impossible to integrate picu with every theme’s design.
Obviously that might be a deal breaker for some. But what would you rather have a great plugin that makes proofing easy, that keeps your customers engaged and coming back to your site or a plugin that aesthetically fits into a particular theme.
There are thousands of themes and WordPress developers, but not that many great photo proofing plugins…
In addition, sure picu doesn’t allow changing galleries after it is sent to the client. But this is actually the only way to do it for a reliable photo proofing process.
It’s a proofing plugin after all and not a gallery plugin. If you understand that, it’s perfect.
Sometimes less is more and helps keep the plugin clean and intuitive without unnecessary features or even worse, added code and bloat.
Its modern, light design does just about everything you need, like:
- a) Send a beautiful email to your customers automatically.
- b) Super easy and user-friendly for the customer to browse through the gallery and to check the best images.
- c) Customers will be forwarded to your website afterwards.
- d) Best of all, it accomplishes its main task well and that’s photo proofing.
Gallery Plugin for WordPress – Envira Photo Gallery.
Summary of Reviews:
Reviews tend to be mixed on the Envira Photo Gallery plugin.
Many claim that it’s simple and powerful with easy configuration in its Free Version.
Whereas others complain that many very basic and fundamental functionality are left out in order to get you to upgrade. Things you might not notice until you build a whole site and discover the sneaky ways they use to get you to upgrade.
Simple things like import/export, center justify images, remove title, and many more, these are only available in the premium version.
In addition, you are also limited to using them on a few sites.
Others say that quality has gone down and seems to have gotten worse over the years.
Things break more regularly. For example: Broken links in the documentation, wrong dimensions on mobile image sizes, inconsistent behavior and persistent bugs.
However, in the end the overall consensus is that it does do exactly what it says on the box and it’s an amazingly easy setup especially for photographers who aren’t very code literate.
This plugin provides a great look and good loading performance without delays. Basic, clean and simple. Easy for the end user to update, which is very important.
The installation is seamless. It is extremely easy to set up and use.
Sunshine Photo Cart.
Summary of Reviews:
Sunshine Photo Cart is straightforward to set up. It looks professional, and works with various payment gateways, one of the few photography management plugins with photo proofing that does.
It integrates well with WordPress and makes the payment process seem, well, seamless as it operates under your website’s domain name.
It’s an overall great plugin for selling and organizing photos. Sunshine also has super fast customer service to fix any bugs. Even when you need a bit of support getting it set up.
Sunshine Photo Cart takes the hassle out of delivering photos to your clients, and the authors seem to have thought of everything from downloads to watermarks to messaging and payments.
The best side and possibly unintentional benefit is that while clients are right there on your website when they come to download, they just might wander through your other pages and learn more about your photography business and any other services you offer.
Whether you have clients that just want to be able to buy just one or two photos or the entire gallery, this plugin does that and more.
This plugin does everything you need to sell photos online. It’s easy to use and if you have any trouble, which sometimes happens when payments and downloads are involved, the support is top notch and will get you situated right away. Perfect for Freelance Photographers.
Sunshine Photo Cart is a pretty damn robust WordPress plugin, if you use it right..
So which is the Top WordPress Photo Proofing plugin?
Based on the research I’ve done. Along with collecting the reviews from photographers using these WordPress photography management plugins, focusing purely on their photo proofing features. I’ve come to the conclusion that the picu plugin is the best WordPress photography management photo proofing plugin.
This is not to say that these other WordPress photo photography plugins also aren’t top notch, they are.
In fact, I personally think if you tally up all the other features all these WordPress photography plugins have, you will find that they have stronger features in other areas other than photo proofing.
But they all have photo proofing capabilities and seem to do a fine job as well.
So if you are looking for a WordPress photo management plugin and your main focus for using one is for photo proofing then again the picu photo proofing plugin is for you.
