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“These themes are hand-picked for their outstanding design quality, features, and customer reviews.”
Ready to launch your site?
You’ll need a great theme to show off your portfolio. Whether you’ve got illustrations, logos, products, or photographs to display, the right theme will make your work look even better.
Below you’ll find our top recommended WordPress themes for gallery sites. They’re highly customizable and make browsing portfolios fun and seamless.
You’ll also find professional features included for photographers, such as photo proofing and private client galleries.
If this is your first site, follow our guide on how to create your own online gallery website to get started.
WordPress gallery themes
All of these themes work with the latest version of WordPress and are fully responsive. That means they’ll look and work great on computers, tablets, and smartphones.
These themes work perfectly for any visual media – photo albums, art galleries, and video galleries – you name it.
Here are my top picks for best gallery WordPress themes for 2024.
1. Azalea by Elated Themes (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Azalea is a chic and fashionable WordPress theme for galleries and photography. Its minimalist style is supported by the professional use of typography and spacing, which give it a confident form.
This media-based template includes 12 different homepages. Page builders are great, but a diverse set of pre-designed layouts make it easy to make the site of your dreams fast. There are many more pre-made templates for the inner pages of your site. For instance, create stylish pages for your About, Contact, or Services pages.
If you’re interested in selling digital or physical products, you’ll love the WooCommerce support. Adding a shop is easy, and the shop design is just like the rest of your portfolio layouts. Additional features like photo proofing and client archives make Azalea a top choice for photographers.
2. Travis by Pixel Mafia (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Travis is a dark theme made for photographers and other creatives with images to showcase.
What sets Travis apart is the huge amount of gallery layouts – 18 in total! You can find full-screen sliders and classic grid layouts, but there are many more fascinating and unique designs in Travis. You can create as many galleries as you want and showcase your images with a new layout every time.
The Travis gallery theme has a live page builder that lets you preview your changes instantly while editing the site. It also comes with WooCommerce integration for selling physical or digital prints and dark/light color variations. You’ll love the bold, full-width image presentation in Travis if you have plenty of beautiful, high-resolution images to show off.
3. Divi by Elegant Themes
Theme Description
The screenshot above is from a restaurant demo site created with Divi, but it’s just a minor reference point. Divi can create galleries with as many columns, rows, and layouts as you’d like. Not to mention, it can serve any niches, as you can gauge from the 200 demo sites the designers have prepared.
With Divi, you don’t need a third-party page builder plugin because it comes with the Divi Builder plugin included. Using Divi and Divi Builder, you’ll construct an entirely custom website. You can use Divi to publish photographs and illustrations or use it as a video gallery theme.
Divi now has a marketplace full of extra add-ons and child themes, so no matter what design you’re looking for, you can find an awesome pre-made solution.
4. Astra by Brainstorm Force
Theme Description
Astra is another multipurpose theme, meaning you can create as many websites as you want with as many different designs as you’d like. It’s perfect for freelancers or avid site creators.
The screenshot above shows off one of the 150 professional templates designed for Astra. Obviously, it’s a great template for a travel agency, but you can use Astra for any niche you want. If you use the Elementor page builder or one of the other page builders, you can import any templates to recreate the same design on your site. Then you can tweak and edit the design as you see fit.
Astra also has a header and footer builder, offers fast load times, and has an excellent community built around it.
5. Gallery Pro by StudioPress
Theme Description
Gallery Pro is a sleek and stylish portfolio theme. Italicized serif fonts and a spacious layout make for a minimalist and elegant design.
This photo gallery theme is well-rounded and comes with a variety of templates. Each template has an attractive and user-friendly design. Beyond displaying your images, it’s also easy to publish text-based content. This includes a blog, multiple widget areas, and custom page templates. You can publish galleries and all of this content without adding image gallery plugins or other third-party tools.
Gallery Pro comes with StudioPress’s fast and customizable Genesis Framework. You’ll get access to the avid community and wealth of knowledge they have in addition to the gallery theme.
6. Portfolio by MyThemeShop
Theme Description
Portfolio is a minimalist gallery theme. Its clean design and liberal use of whitespace put all the emphasis on your images.
The homepage features a live-sorting gallery which makes browsing easy for visitors. Set up your categories to customize the filtering choices. Clicking an image instantly loads more info without loading a new page by using AJAX.
Portfolio comes with many customization options, including custom fonts, colors, and background images. This minimalist theme also lets you change the number of columns in the gallery, and you can choose the image size too.
Portfolio is a well-designed and responsive WordPress gallery theme. It would work well for graphic designers, fashion designers, and other creatives.
7. Expression by Pexeto (Themeforest)
Theme Description
If your goal is to show off photographs and images, you can’t go wrong with Expression.
The Expression theme dedicates more screen space to the gallery than any other theme on this list. If you want to show off your images, this theme may be the best choice.
Clicking an item opens a lightbox where visitors can navigate through fullscreen images. Navigation is available via arrows and by use of the mouse wheel or keyboard.
Expression includes custom image sizes, built-in social sharing, and 34 different background patterns. Pexeto also has an integration with WP/LR Sync. This integration lets you sync your Lightroom images with WordPress so that you can import your entire image library.
8. Vega by ThemeGoods (Themeforest)
Theme Description
The minimalist Vega theme is perfect for photographers. It comes complete with a gallery, portfolio, and special homepage layouts.
Typical galleries are great for displaying images, but if you want to give visitors more control, try one of Vega’s photography portfolio templates. These image layouts let you add custom filters to the page to click to switch between categories quickly. It’s a great solution for galleries that have many photos to browse.
Vega is packed with cool features like video galleries and private galleries, which are excellent for preparing a set of photographs for a client. It’s a trendy theme with over 3,000 sales and has been updated consistently over the years. All of the time and care that has gone into Vega has made it a very effective and reliable theme for publishing photo galleries.
9. Branis by WebAngon (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Branis is a simple and charming gallery-style theme. It’s quick to set up, so you can launch your image collection right away with this theme.
Branis integrates with the Unyson page builder to provide many different layout styles. Switch sidebar positions instantly and create custom layouts with the page builder.
This WP theme also comes with one-click demo data imports. If you’re starting a new site, this is an excellent way to learn the theme and create the same display as seen in the live demo.
10. Gallery by Dessign
Theme Description
Gallery is a responsive and modern theme made specifically to create image galleries. Unlike the other themes listed here, Gallery is 100% free, so you can install it on your site to give it a try.
The Gallery features a two-column layout showcasing images that are sourced from posts. You can also publish posts separately on the standard blog.
Gallery is easy to set up and comes with a simple set of customization tools. These include settings for colors, social media icons, the background color, and more.
11. Peak by Themify.me
Theme Description
Peak is a full-featured portfolio theme. The aesthetic is clean and friendly, and the theme is quite easy to use.
You can do a lot more than show off a few images with Peak. This gallery theme includes mega menus, a slide-out sidebar, and full WooCommerce support. That means you can sell anything you display on your site.
For the gallery, Peak has plenty of customization options. Auto-tiling will create a dynamic layout for you, or you can set custom sizes for each image (or category). You’ll even get layout options for the post pages and a customizable header image section.
12. Nico by CSSIgniter
Theme Description
Nico is a gorgeous personal portfolio theme. You can use this design to promote a broad range of visual work. The large sidebar creates a spacious feel without distracting from the image gallery.
Like the Portfolio theme by MyThemeShop, Nico has a filterable gallery. Visitors will have no problems browsing your work with the filterable homepage gallery.
Nico is completely responsive, meaning it looks and works great on tablets and phones too. As for customization, there are color schemes, custom widgets, and a mixture of gallery layouts. Portfolio items use a custom post type which allows you to publish posts separately on the blog.
Which gallery theme is right for you?
What did you think of the themes?
Azalea is our top recommendation for any photographer. Pre-made templates, eCommerce support, and features like photo proofing make it an excellent choice for professionals.
Divi is a great choice if you want to customize every pixel of your site, or if you plan on making more than one site.
Astra should be the first pick for any freelancer or professional builder because it offers exceptional style and a streamlined site-building workflow.
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