Gallery is open source web based photo album organizer. Gallery gives you an intuitive way to blend photo management seamlessly into your own website whether you’re running a small personal site or a large community site.

Gallery 3.0 means simple, powerful and secure photo management. Upload and manage your photos effortlessly, while creating a beautiful experience for your friends and family. If you’re a developer, you can easily add new features or create your own elegant themes.

This release is code named Santa Fe to commemorate the location of our last team meetup. It was thanks to the generous donations from many of you that we were able to get to the team together and make a big push to move Gallery forward. We had a wonderful time in New Mexico and want to celebrate that milestone of our release.

Download it now!

by Sean P Aune

It’s easy to forget that sometimes that WordPress can be used for more than just a blogging platform. Due to its open nature, and thanks to many theme builders, it can easily be turned into a gallery to show off your latest work. Why should you take time away from working on paying jobs to work on your own gallery? There are a slew of themes for WordPress that can do the job for you, and many offer easy customization so it isn’t too obvious that your gallery is an off-the-shelf solution.

We’ve gathered up a nice selection of free and paid solutions, so you can get that gallery working for you right away — no matter what your budget!

Free WordPress Portfolio Themes

Ascari: A very artistic theme, with a unique “top” button that follows you as you scroll down the page so that the user can quickly return to the point from which they began. This one is definitely more about just showing off your work, but it does it in a beautiful manner.

CSS Gallery: CSS Gallery is built with web designers in mind. Each image on the front page can rated by site visitors, but when they click on the examples, they are taken to the live version of that work. Theme also features spots for GoogleAdSense and 125X125 ads, and, best of all, it’s free.

f8: f8 allows you to customize colors, fonts, front page categories, contact info, slideshow height and other options all from the theme options page in the admin section so that you may change it to your heart’s content. All thumbnails link to full blog posts where you can then provide your users with as much information as you like about the work you did.

Gallery: Built on the Thematic Theme framework, this dark gallery theme is quite the eye catcher. The top row is all 125×125 ad spots, but after that each image is a separate gallery link that when you hover over it, the image slides up to show you the name. The individual post pages will give you more information about the work, who designed it, and where it can be found, as well as allow users to rate it and to leave comments.

iQ2: iQ2 is a fully skinnable, widget-ready, WordPress theme directed at photographers wanting to show off their work, but is easily usable for anyone wanting to show off their works or designs. It does require you download and install the PhotoQ Photoblog Plugin as this is what powers the theme. No charge is associated with this theme, but donations are welcomed.

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Best Web Gallery is an inspirational gallery showcase where I collect and feature all the best design sites.

Behind the site

Best Web Gallery is powered by WordPress with some plugins. Here is the list of plugins that I used.

Category Visibility
I used this plugin to prevent the sidenotes being showed in the gallery section.

WP-PageNavi
This plugin creates a pagination menu for easy navigation.

Post Templates by Category
This plugin allows you to use custom single post templates for specified categories. I used this plugin in the single post of Extras section.

Paged Comments
It breaks down comment entries into a number of pages with paginated navigation.

Sideblog WordPress Plugin
I used this plugin for the Extras section.

SEO Title Tag
This plugin is used for the title tag.