WordPress’ native media library is great. Easily upload, edit, resize images, create image galleries and video playlists, adjust alt tag values for SEO, it does a lot. It also has limitations. For the average user, those limitations might not really be felt until your media library grows to some pretty epic proportions, at which point management can get a little hairy. For the professional photographer or those that need more than the average user right out of the gate, you may hit that wall sooner. Fortunately, this is WordPress! Let’s take a look at some really cool plugins that make managing WordPress images easy!
6 Plugins for Managing WordPress images
1) NextGEN Gallery
Definitely one of the most feature rich plugins on the list for managing WordPress images, NextGEN Gallery is geared towards an image-oriented website. Whether you work with images professionally or just really want to tweak away at your media library, this plugin lets you do it. NextGEN Gallery has over 1 million WordPress users, good reviews, and gets regular update love.
Features:
- Multiple display/album styles for front end
- Control size, style, timing, transitions, lightbox effects, and more
- batch upload images
- import meta data
- add, delete, rearrange, and sort images
- edit thumbnails
- group galleries into albums
2) Enhanced Media Library
Enhanced Media Library is certainly a Media Library overhaul, but it’s one focused more on pure inventory management, perhaps. It does it very well. The default WordPress Media Library gets very bulky very fast. Enhanced Media Library alleviates a lot of that pain and makes managing hundreds, or even dozens, of images far easier. They boast almost 100k active installs, excellent reviews, and regular updates.
Features:
- Media taxonomies (categories and tags)
- Filter-based shortcodes
- MIME media file types
- Export/Import plugin settings
- Free support
- WordPress native functionality oriented
3) Media Library Assistant
Where the plugins above specialize in image oriented websites and inventory management in turn, Media Library Assistant offers you a ton of new features including a variety of custom shortcodes. If you want fine grain control over many aspects of your Media Library, this is where it’s at. Media Library Assistant has over 30,000 active installs, excellent reviews, and receives regular updates.
Features:
- shortcodes for displaying , sorting, and ordering images
- 25 hooks for complete cloud customization from your theme or plugin code
- Content templates
- Attachment metadata
- full support for WPML and Polylang multi-language plugins
- Enhanced search media box
- Taxonomy and custom field supprt
4) Remote Media Libraries
Taking a turn here away from file management and functionality upgrades, Remote Media Libraries offers us a novel set of features. With this plugin for managing WordPress images, you can easily embed media from external sources. Insert media from Youtube, Vimeo, Flickr, Instagram, and more. Remote Media Libraries has a small user base with less than 1,000 active installs, but they have great reviews and update history.
5) Media Library Categories
There’s a lot to be said for keeping it simple. If you’re jut looking for a small bit of organizational help to make finding images in your Media Library easier, then Media Library Categories has what you need. It introduces a category structure for the images in your Media Library. You can select the category you need from a dropdown and see only the images with that category. Editing categories on images is made easy with a bulk action feature. Media Library Categories has over 20,000 active installs, great reviews, and receives regular updates.
6) Media File Renamer
Continuing with the theme of specialty plugins, Media File Renamer does one thing and does it well. By default, WordPress will only allow you to edit the title and alt text for an image. If you want to rename it, you have to delete it entirely, rename the file from your device, and re-upload it. That’s a pain, especially if you need to rename multiple images. Media File Renamer fixes that for you. They have more than 20,000 active installs, great reviews, and receive regular updates.
That’s that! Hopefully you’ve found something there that will make managing WordPress images easier. If you know of other cool plugins that enhance or extend the functionality of the WordPress Media Library, please share!
Leave a Reply