PhotoPress

PHOTOPRESS is an integrated suite of image management and gallery presentation features that photographers can use to build photography centric websites. The plugin allows you to create beautiful designed image galleries as well as extract, store and publish any EXIF/IPTC/XMP meta-data embedded in your images.

The broader goal of PHOTOPRESS is to make WordPress easy to use for photographers by bringing critical image management and presentation features together into a single, modern, and free plugin. Features currently include:

GALLERY LAYOUTS

PhotoPress adds Masonry, Rows and Mosaic layouts to the WordPress Gallery block.

• Masonry arranges images in columns of a width you set. Each image keeps its own height.
• Rows arranges images in rows of a height you set. Each image keeps its own width.
• Mosaic fills each row to the gallery’s width. Each image keeps its own proportions.
• Any gallery can open the full-screen slideshow when an image is clicked.
• Images load at the size the layout shows them, so pages load faster.
• An image deleted from the Media Library is removed from the galleries that show it.

Documentation: Gallery Layouts.

FULL-SCREEN SLIDESHOW

• Clicking an image in a gallery opens it in a slideshow that fills the window.
• Visitors move through the images by clicking either half of the image, swiping or using the arrow keys.
• It can show a row of thumbnails, and the image’s caption, title, description and a link to its page.

Documentation: Full-Screen Slideshow.

GALLERY SLIDESHOW BLOCK

• The Gallery Slideshow block shows a gallery on the same page as a slideshow, placed anywhere on the page.
• Clicking an image in the gallery shows it in the slideshow.
• It can show thumbnails, captions and autoplay, with a slide or fade between images.
• It can hide the gallery so only the slideshow shows.

Documentation: Gallery Slideshow Block.

CHILD PAGES GALLERY

• The Child Pages Gallery block shows the pages under a page as a gallery, each page as an image linked to it. It makes a good index of gallery pages.
• Updating PhotoPress converts the older Child Pages block to a Child Pages Gallery.

Documentation: Child Pages Gallery.

IMAGE METADATA MANAGEMENT

• Image taxonomies: PhotoPress files each uploaded photo under its camera, lens, location, keywords and other metadata, with an archive page for each.
• You choose which metadata fields become taxonomies, including keyword hierarchies from Lightroom or Capture One and any IPTC field.
• The Image Metadata block shows an image’s terms and exposure details on its page.
• A Replace file button with each image’s details uploads a new file for it, at the same address, and reads its metadata again.
• Titles, captions, alt text and descriptions are written from each photo’s metadata when it is uploaded: the title from its Title, the caption from its Headline and the description from its Description.
• Licensing metadata is embedded in your image files and published as structured data on the pages that show them.
• Changes can be applied to the images already in the Media Library, in the background.

Documentation: Image Taxonomies, Alt Text and Descriptions, Licensing.

IMAGE TEMPLATES

PhotoPress adds two templates to block themes: Image Archives and Image Pages. They need WordPress 6.7 or later. If the theme has its own template for these pages, the theme’s is used.

• Image Archives shows a keyword’s, camera’s or other term’s images in a gallery, with links to more pages.
• Image Pages shows an image with its caption, description, terms and exposure details.
• You can edit both templates in the Site Editor.
• The Taxonomy Gallery block shows the latest images, or the images of a chosen term, in any PhotoPress layout.

Documentation: Image Templates and Blocks, Taxonomy Gallery.

IMAGE AND TAXONOMY PAGES

• Attachment pages: a switch that publishes, or stops publishing, a page for each image in the Media Library.
• Image taxonomy pages: a switch that publishes, or stops publishing, an archive page of images for each keyword, camera and other term.

Documentation: Attachment and Taxonomy Pages.

SEARCH

• Images in search results: a switch that adds images to the site’s search results, found by their titles, captions, alt text and terms.
• Block themes get an Image Search template that shows the images found in a gallery and lists the matching posts and pages below it.
• With Relevanssi, PhotoPress has Relevanssi index images with their alt text and taxonomy terms.

Documentation: Image Search.

SEO

• PhotoPress adds image pages and image taxonomy archive pages to the site’s sitemap, whether it is WordPress’s own, Jetpack‘s or Yoast SEO‘s.
• With WordPress’s own sitemap, PhotoPress adds an image sitemap to it: each image with the page it is shown on.
• Unneeded archives: a switch that disables author, date and post format archives, each on its own, redirecting them to the home page and leaving them out of the sitemap.

Documentation: Sitemaps.

PAGE CACHE

On a site with a Varnish page cache and the Proxy Cache Purge plugin, PhotoPress purges the cached pages that show an image, a gallery or an image taxonomy term when it changes.

Documentation: Page Cache.

IMAGE SIZES

• You set the quality WordPress saves JPEG and WebP images at.
• You can turn off image sizes your site does not use, so WordPress stops making them.
• Save and regenerate updates the images already uploaded, in the background.

Documentation: Image Sizes.

OFFLOAD MEDIA

These features need the WP Offload Media plugin.

• You set how long browsers and the CDN cache offloaded images.
• A replaced image is cleared from CloudFront, so visitors see the new file.
• A replaced image’s old files can be deleted from cloud storage.

Documentation: Offload Media and CDN.

Development

Our development motto is “do no harm” which means that we leverage the patterns outlined in WordPress Core and the Gutenberg editor as opposed to creating proprietary features that impede the overall usability of WordPress.

PHOTOPRESS is actively developed on Github. Please file any bugs, feature, or support requests on Github!