Opens InstaWP. No signup, no card.
- It expires after four hours.The sandbox is temporary by design. Launch another whenever you like.
- You get admin.Front end and wp-admin both, so you can see what an owner configures, not just what a visitor sees.
- Nothing is kept.Anything you upload disappears with the sandbox. Do not put a real photo in it.
Worth trying
Four things to do in the first five minutes
The sandbox opens on a library that already has media in it, so there is no empty-state stage to get through first.
-
Upload something
The upload screen is on the front end, where a member would meet it. Drop a file in, tag it, and pick who can see it before it is saved. Nobody needs a wp-admin login to do this.
-
Drop a filtered grid on a page
The gallery block takes a tag, a category, a media type or a member. Set it to one tag and the page fills itself as people post. The named feed layouts are Pro, so the sandbox shows the free grid.
-
Open a member library
Every member gets their own library, filterable by the tags they used. Look at one and see what its owner controls versus what you as the site owner control.
-
Open one photo
A photo is not a file in a folder here. It has a title, a caption, reactions and a view count, and the owner gets edit controls nobody else sees.
What the sandbox will not show you
It runs the free plugin, so nothing Pro is in it: no cloud storage, no per-member quotas, no photo competitions, none of the four named feed layouts, and none of the importers. Cloud storage in particular is the one feature a four-hour sandbox is the wrong place to judge, because the point of it is what happens to your disk over a year. And because it is a fresh install, it holds a handful of demo files rather than the library a real community builds.
If you would rather run it properly, the free plugin is the same code without the timer.