Images and photos are an integral part of almost every successful blog these days. If your text isn’t accompanied by images, few people are going to be interested in what you’ve got to say- it’s sad, but true. The problem is, with so many people uploading images to their blogs in interesting and unique ways, it’s hard to make your blog stand out unless you’re doing the same.

WordPress doesn’t make it easy for you to engage your readers with images. You’re going to have to look beyond core to the hundreds of image/photo based plugins available to make your blog highly visual. Below, you’ll find a score of solutions to all your image/photo problems in the form of the best plugins around. There are lazy loaders, gallery creators, slideshow generators, photoblog initiators and much, much more. You’ll soon realize that there’s more to WordPress than a few lousy thumbnails!

1. jQuery Image Lazy Loader WP

Lazy Loader is the perfect plugin for those who want to upload lots of images to their blog, but maintain a snappy site. Rather than loading all of the images on a page at once, which can take a considerable amount of time, Lazy Loader loads the images at the top of each page first and continues to load images further down as the user scrolls downwards.

2. Frontpage-Slideshow

This plugin does exactly what its name suggests: it lets you create a professional slideshow on the front page of your WordPress blog. Each picture is clickable, leading you to its related post, and information about four different slides can be displayed at a time. Transitions between slides are faded to look extra sleek.

3. NextGEN Gallery

NextGEN is without question the best WordPress gallery plugin available and you should certainly try it out if you haven’t already. It’s comprehensive, with an easily understandable back-end. The only problem is that everyone’s using it. It does pretty much everything you’d want from a gallery plugin, looks professional and comes with a Flash slideshow option.

4. WP Photo Album

Unlike most of the plugins in this list, which focus more on user experience, WP Photo Album is made specifically for the blogger him- or herself. It makes creating and managing your photo albums easy, letting you move images between albums and adjust the sizes of thumbnails and full view pictures.

5. Flickr Photo Album

If you regularly upload photos to Flickr before transferring them to your WordPress blog, this plugin’s going to make your life a whole lot easier. You simply select Flickr photosets and display them on your blog as galleries, which you can customize to suit the look and feel of your site. It comes with a great widget which lets you display your latest Flickr photos in your blog’s sidebar.

6. FlippingBook

Use FlippingBook to add an extra element of interactivity to your blog and fully engage your visitors. Rather than displaying images in the standard way (a la NextGEN), FlippingBook displays them in Flash books, which can be flipped through with ease and great enjoyment. You can create these “books” in the administrator panel.

7. Cincopa: Post Videos and Photo Galleries

When it comes to displaying images, Cincopa does it all, creating polished image galleries and slideshows, not to mention videos, playlists and podcasts. It gives you access to 44 different skins to be sure that all Cincopa blogs retain a degree of individuality.

8. Lightbox2

Lightbox2 is simple, but devastatingly effective. Like all lightbox-type plugins, it lets you enlarge and overlay images on the current page, while dimming what’s left in the background. Unique to Lightbox2 is the ability to group related images and use numerous visual effects.

9. WordPress Content Slide

Use WordPress Content Slide to create jQuery slideshows anywhere within your WordPress blog. These slideshows fade in and out to add a touch of class to your site. Content Slide is fully customizable, even letting you link to another website if you like, to use the slideshow as an advertising banner.

10. Yet Another Photoblog

Far more interesting than its name suggests, Yet Another Photoblog (YAPB) is perfect for those who upload more images than text. It’s not a gallery plugin; it only lets you upload one image per post with a description. Using the YAPB Bulk Uploader plugin, you can mass upload images to your YAPB blog in an instant.

11. Lazyest Gallery

Lazyest Gallery is a powerful plugin with lots of great features. It rotates random images from your gallery, fading each one in and out. It’s fully customizable from the back end, letting you select the number of random images shown, portrait/landscape or both and various fading settings. It also allows comments on images and folders.

12. Shadowbox JS

Shadowbox is not only a great way to display images on your WordPress blog, it’s ideal for sharing videos too. Never again will you have to guide visitors away from your blog for them to view media as all images, audio files and videos, including YouTube videos will play directly on your site.

13. Sidebar Photoblog

14. Thumbnail For Excerpts

With this simple plugin, you can add thumbnail images to any excerpts you might have on your site, making it instantly more attractive and easier to navigate, improving usability and visitor experience.

15. Flickr Gallery

There are several plugins available which make uploading your photos from Flickr to WordPress easy, but this is one of the best. It lets you quickly create galleries of your most recent and most popular Flickr photos, view photos in gallery mode without leaving the page, display small images automatically in lightbox mode and embed Flickr’s Flash movie player.

16. Featured Content Gallery

Featured Content Gallery can transform your humble blog into a professional looking portfolio site. Besides other things, it creates a rotating image gallery of your posts or pages, which you can place anywhere on your blog. Each image can be overlaid with an extract from the text too.

17. Freebie Images

If stock images play a significant part in your professional (or personal) life, Freebie Images comes highly recommended. Search through a directory of thousands of regularly updated, free stock images which you can drag and drop into your posts.

18. Dynamic Content Gallery

Dynamic Content Gallery generates an image gallery with a shot for each of your latest or featured posts and pages (although default images can be added too.) What makes this plugin stand out from the rest is the slick look of the gallery itself.

19. SlideZoom

SlideZoom prides itself on its simplicity and quite rightly so. It’s particularly lightweight and straightforward. It lets you bulk or zip upload images to your blog, generating a HighSlide JS gallery that you can embed in WordPress or anywhere else you like, such as on another blog, eBay or a forum.

20. DM Albums

DM albums presents your photos in a really distinctive way, enlarging all images to perfectly fit the size of your blog, rather than showing them in a window half the size of your screen. You can add captions to individual photos and albums from within the WordPress Editor.

Let us know if we forgot some great plugin. We would love to hear your thoughts.

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