Best, most incredibly powerful free gallery, with upgrade options

After trying several gallery software options for WordPress, over the course of a couple days, “Visual Portfolio” wins by far. While the language and documentation are not very clear, and it takes a while to explore its full power, this tool is a behemoth of programming that makes galleries user-friendly, elegant and easy to update.

A few minor improvements could be customized by your own efforts if you wanted, such as the CSS of the hover states, the lightbox, or the filters (as a drop down or as buttons).

It also took me a while to figure out how WordPress’ native Categories can be used as a gallery source (and WordPress native Tags used as identifying collections) by choosing “Posts” as the gallery source, but nested Categories are not respected so you’d have to figure out how to do that or see if buying a Pro option would solve the native nesting power of WordPress Categories. (WordPress itself could improve its native Media category for all plugins by allowing native Media Tags in media objects rather than restricting native Tags to other content, but I digress.)

In any case, I would encourage anyone interested in the program to download it and try playing with it for about a week to see all the interesting features available. It’s a remarkably well thought-out program that deserves slightly better documentation.