WordPress photo gallery
Every other gallery plugin assumes one person does the uploading, and that person is you. This one assumes hundreds of people do, which changes the grid, the privacy model and what happens when somebody posts something they should not have.
You upload the photos
A portfolio, a product gallery, a set of event photos you shot yourself. You want a lightbox and a tidy grid, and you are the only person who will ever add to it.
A display gallery plugin is the right tool, and this is not one. Nothing below will help you.
Other people upload the photos
Members, guests, students, clients, a club. People who do not have a wp-admin login and should never need one, adding to the gallery themselves.
That is a different problem with a different shape, and it is the one this page is about.
Layouts Pro
These four are in Pro, and they change the whole feed rather than one block. The same media, rendered the way the app each layout is named after renders it. The free plugin ships the grid, which shows every photo at its own aspect ratio instead of square-cropping it, so portrait and landscape sit together.
A single-column feed with a stories row across the top. Nobody needs it explained to them.
Variable-height cards in columns, each with its title and who posted it. Portrait and landscape sit together without letterboxing either.
Flickr
A justified wall with no card around anything. Best when the point is how much there is.
Dribbble
A uniform card grid with the author under each shot. Every item gets exactly the same space.
Where each of these sits in the licence, and everything else that does: free versus Pro, row by row.
Filtering
Drop the grid block on any page and narrow it. The library stays single, so nothing is duplicated and nothing goes stale, but each page shows only its own slice.
This is what stops a member-fed gallery turning into one endless scroll by its second year. More on curated grids.
With one uploader, "is this gallery public" is a checkbox you tick once. With many, it has to be a decision per photo, made by the person who took it, at the moment they upload it. MediaVerse sets a privacy level per item and per album, and carries it into the activity stream instead of dropping it there.
How privacy worksNot often, but eventually, and the first time is not when you want to be looking for a plugin. Members report an item, it lands in a review queue, and the log records who acted on it. That is in the free plugin, because a gallery that accepts uploads and cannot handle this is unfinished.
How moderation worksThe full line between free and Pro, including what Pro cannot do yet.
Free, on as many sites as you like. Uploads, albums, privacy, the filtered grid and the moderation queue are all in it.
