While there is no shortage of photo storage and sharing services around these days, if you’re a serious photographer who makes a living taking pictures, you’re going to need a website to promote your business, interact with clients, and display your images.
Many photographers choose WordPress for their business sites. It’s a powerful content management system and it combines just the right amounts of flexibility and ease-of-use to offer users who aren’t technically inclined a straightforward platform to build their site on.
But, one of the main draws for photographers is the huge number of photography-focused plugins available for WordPress. They turn WordPress from being a great application to build any site into a site that’s perfectly suited for running a photography business.
In this article, I’m going to look at six plugins that any photographer should know about.
SlideDeck 2 For WordPress
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There are many slider plugins for WordPress, but SlideDeck 2 takes sliders to another level. It makes it very easy to create customized sliders to display images, text, and videos. SlideDeck includes dozens of “lenses”, which allow for the creation of many different slider formats.
Shutter
Shutter is a photo proofing and slideshow plugin that allows photographers to display images for their clients to select. It includes watermarking features so that photographers can display their images without allowing them to be downloaded in their unmarked version, and per client galleries so that clients can browse their sets, make choices, and access the full resolution version with or without payment.
BirchPress
If you’re a portrait photographer or need a way to manage appointments, BirchPress is the plugin for you. It’s a powerful scheduling and booking extension that allows clients to see your availability and book appointments from within your WordPress website.
SEO Friendly Images
Photography sites are obviously image intensive, and that means you need to pay particular attention to search engine optimizing your images. SEO Friendly Images will help you take care of you images ALT and TITLE attributes tags.
Media Manager Plus
While WordPress is great for displaying images, its media management capabilities may be more limited than a professional photographer is used to. Most will use external services for hosting images, like Flickr or 500px. Media Manage Plus is a handy way to integrate those services with WordPress’s media management, allowing photographers to easily bring images from external hosting and sharing services into their site.
Simplified Social Sharing
Of course, it’s not enough to get images into your site, you’ll also need to provide a way for your site’s users to share them over social media. Simplified Social Sharing provide a straightforward sharing widget that supports most of the major social networks.
These are some of the highlights available for photographers who use WordPress, but there are many more. If you have a favorite photography related plugin, feel free to share it in the comments below.
