Top Wordpress Plugins for Video and Photo Galleries 2012

I am a Rhode Island SEO specialist who runs my own business – RI web design and SEO.  I posted this blog, in hopes of saving people time from searching through a bunch of different video/photo gallery WordPress plugins.  I know it can be very time consuming, finding what plugins work the best to embed video and/or photos onto a website.  And to add, to what already can be a slow process, some of these plugins make it hard to find the short code needed to make these plugins work.

After trying a dozen or more video and photo gallery plugins, here are the plugins (and short codes) that I would recommend.  

For Video, the best plugin I found was Tubepress.  Easy to install and easy to use, this plugin lets you stream youtube videos to your website. The best part of this plugin is that it gives us many choices in organizing what videos to stream. 

1. You can stream just one video directly from Youtube to your website by plugging in the Youtube video id.
2. You can stream all your Youtube videos, starting from the most recent, by just inputting your Youtube user id.
3. You can stream a playlist by inputting your Youtube playlist id. I found this choice to be the most flexible for me, all I had to do was pick the videos I wanted, make a Youtube playlist, and then input the playlist id into Tubepress. This is a real easy way to display exactly what videos you want, onto your website.

Here is an example of the Tubepress short code to put on your wordpress page. This code will stream a Youtube playlist to your website.

[tubepress video="FcKlDnmRYS8"]

My favorite plugin for photos is the NextGEN Gallery. It is also very versatile and can be scalable through add on plugins.  It is simple to set up a gallery and also easy to embed the gallery as a static photo gallery or as a slideshow.  Even the static gallery looks great with the embedded light box feature. 

If you want a slideshow with more features like thumbnails, just add the JJ NextGEN Slider plugin to the NextGEN Gallery plugin.  A slider slideshow is when the images slide right to left, here is an example on a natural perfumes website.

The  NextGEN short cut code is [nggallery id=2 w=650 h=650] and the JJ NextGEN Slider code for a slideshow with thumbnails is [jj-ngg-jquery-slider gallery="4" html_id="collister" effect="fade" width="500" height="300" center="1" controlnavthumbs="nextgen_thumbs" thumbswidth="50" thumbsheight="50" thumbscontainerheight="120" thumbsgap="5"]

I hope these plugin choices help!

Justin Capaldi owns a Rhode Island web design and SEO company.