It may be hard to pick a WordPress photography theme because there are so many of them. And you’ve probably heard lots of renowned names, but still confused which direction to follow.
But this time, let’s look through some new WordPress photography themes and probably some fresh ideas will make your search easier. Why new, actually? A new theme (especially by the reputable author) promises more chances for being made in the best latest design and functionality practices.
It’s sometimes easier to create something new than re-create or improve the old theme, even (or especially) when it comes to popular ‘multipurpose’ and ‘feature-rich’ themes. In these times and days, when technology continues to blow our minds with leaps and limits, new themes may offer unique photography conсepts and give you a chance to create an amazing photographer’s portfolio, which will stand out.
If you need some more criteria of how to choose a right photography theme for your needs, here is a quick list for you:
- Go with simplicity (a theme peppered with too many design and functionality features can have a bad effect on your site performance and the UX);
- Easy resizing and smart cropping (variety of layouts to choose the most suitable one);
- Smart SEO architecture – fast-loading theme, individual URLs for images, alt tags, easy mobile navigation;
- Minimum dependence on extra plugins and rather using native WordPress functionality;
- Ease of navigation on desktops and touch devices;
- Affordable eCommerce tools and easily set up password restricted area (if needed);
- Ease of customization even for WordPress newbies.
These are the main things! Add yours to the list as well and believe your gut when selecting a theme. So, here are some of the best new WordPress photography themes released in 2017.
April
A pretty unusual and definitely ‘sophisticated’ photography WordPress theme. I still cannot get where this sophistication comes from: the vintage-sakura-Millais’ Ophelia girls featured or the design itself? Probably both, but I’ll leave you with this question.
All in all, April gives you many design alternatives and elegant uncluttered design. The colors can be also customized. Judging from the demo, the theme will be perfect for female portraits, but don’t see the limit there. Another feature you are probably dreaming about – a one-click demo import is also included. So, sing and dance! Unlike many other WordPress photography themes, April offers a shop layout and a password-protected area for your photographs.
Oh, and they promise you’ll be able to show your photos in a ‘spellbinding’ manner. Wanna check it?
PhotoBuddy
I like this WordPress theme because of the simplicity and a handy hamburger menu. All this thought-out UI helps site visitors stay emotionally connected with the particular project or even photo and not to be distracted by other site elements.
The theme typography deserves another bravo – it’s readable and beautiful. The cropped images in a grid layout is not the best way to go as the featured images can be ugly cropped, so you’ll probably will need to find a workaround.
However, if you were looking for providing this classic ‘grid’ experience, the theme is pretty okay. It also allows to supply your galleries with texts in a very elegant manner.
Foto
Foto is another great WordPress photography theme with 15 home page demos (fullwidth slider, grid images, Polaroid stack, creative grid slider, etc.). All this means only one thing – you have a huge choice of layouts for any purpose and mood! All of them are very stylish and creative, helping you build a truly unique portfolio. The theme creators say ‘design first’ and they mean it.
In addition, the functionality is quite rich as well – more than 30 gallery variations for each album, several headers to choose from, four footer layouts, plus the Option panel that will help you perform all other customization tasks. A collection of Google fonts and Font Awesome icons are at your hand.
Foro supports so much desirable one-click demo data installation. The blog style and typography is pretty impressive. What should probably be improved is the SEO – looks like the URLs cannot be generated for particular images, only for the albums.
Montenegro
If you are looking for a minimalist design for showcasing your talent, Montenegro can be a good choice. You may start with choosing a front page layout from a background image, content slider and background video – all are full screen.
A really stylish typography and colors with Exif metadata are very nice things about the theme. Grid and list layouts for albums are available. Album Portfolio supports images, videos (Vimeo, YouTube), sliders, and SoundCloud.
As for the cons, there might be some issues with performance, because the demo sometimes takes forever to load. Slider navigation inside the album is pretty handy; however, I checked it on mobile and the slider did not swipe at all, so site visitors will need to close the image and then open a new one. Too much work! Submenus are also not supported (not the best choice if you want to feature multiple projects and categories.) However, I think this this theme is quite good for a tiny minimal portfolio of vintage photography collection.
Harmini
Harmini WordPress photography theme is a design and functionality rich solution for creating a modern photographer portfolio. To create a beautiful photo gallery and feature your photos wisely, you are able to use a variety of layouts: Masonry fullscreen showcase, Masonry centered, grid showcase, slider + Masonry centered, etc. Overall, I love the layouts, because they showcase the original parameters of photos and don’t crop them.
The theme is simply full of premade layouts for different purposes and pages, so you won’t need to rack your brain and invite a designer to construct a good-looking website page. Your work will be definitely simplified. Plus, the one-click demo import is another helper.
Harmini also includes the Contact Form 7, Google fonts, and the Unyson Framework with the page builder.
The images inside the galleries are supplied with lots of useful tools like Share buttons, zoom in/out, and fullscreen. However, once cannot comment under individual images.
Nifty Fifty
It’s a rare case when a unique stylish design comes with a great UI, navigation and performance. Nifty Fifty is an awesome and lightweight WordPress photography theme for creating a minimalist portfolio. It comes with 2 color skins – black and white, which you can change with one click.
Very functional and intelligent Masonry layouts of the portfolio are powered by the Jetpack Portfolio (Jetpack is a one of the most popular multipurpose free WordPress plugins developed by WordPress creators). This helps keep the original authenticity of your photos. Moreover, you can easily customize layouts in order to feature your photos in classic grid or other types of layouts. The projects inside the portfolio are easily customizable and categorized. So, you may set the number of columns, details to output, etc.
The navigation of Nifty Fifty theme is very handy – a hamburger menu and quick switching between projects, which works alike great on huge desktop screens and mobile devices. Moreover, Jetpack portfolios are pretty smart to generate individual URLs for all images, which is simply perfect for search engines. The images can be optionally opened in the lightbox, commented, and previewed in different sizes.
If you turn on Photon by Jetpack (image acceleration and editing service, which is one of the free optional solutions of the Jetpack plugin), your photos will be loaded instantly, and the site performance will be just a pleasure for the site visitors and search engine robots. Nifty Fifty theme is perfect for those who want to create a rich portfolio with different sorts of categories, interact with people and share photo stories on a stylish blog.
Avalon
Avalon is a nice theme with beautiful page layouts for different purposes. The theme was released at the beginning of 2017 and already received a huge publicity. The choice of homepage demos is rich: fullwidth, halfIMG, flow gallery, etc. All the premade layouts are very creative and unusual. So you may be sure that your portfolio will be a standout.
Avalon is a perfect choice if you are going to not just show the portfolio with your photos, but also interact with clients and sell your works directly from the site – there is a shop and client page protected area in the theme. Overall, it’s one of the most functionality rich themes and you’ll find a way more options if you check the description.
Pinhole
Pinhole is a cute minimalist theme for photographers. It doesn’t offer anything super sophisticated, but its minimalism is also a very attractive thing. Setting up your gallery, you can choose from different gallery styles – around 30 ones are at your service.
The theme supports Exif metadata, which may be really useful for some clients. Another huge plus of this theme is that it works with native WordPress functionality using child and parent pages for creating some galleries, so you won’t need to overload your site with any extra plugins.
With Pinhole you can even customize the pagination, choosing one from the alternatives; the theme performance is also very nice – even the big amount of images on one page loads really fast. If needed, you may even provide the clients with the client area, where they can download the images. Importing demo data in one click is available.
Moliv
Moliv WordPress photography theme comes with several layout alternatives for the front page (fullscreen slider, vertical fullscreen slider, background image, etc), beautiful animation effects and bold typography. You may also switch the main color skin to black or white; and the overall theme colors are customizable.
To start working with the theme, you may import demo data in just one click. WooCommerce is also there to help you monetize your site and sell the works easily. If you need a help of a drag and drop builder with creating the site pages, Visual Composer plugin will help you do the work so much faster.
Overall, Moliv theme is very creative and powerful solution for a professional photographer’s portfolio.
Sewell
Sewell photography theme comes packaged with different front page demo, with the main accent on huge high quality images. Sophisticated animation effects add a nice visual promotion to the theme.
The overall design is well-balanced, with a diversity of project layouts, like Masonry and grid, and a lot of useful image details, including Exif metadata. Several pre-made inner page layouts will also help you keep a great design and customize your portfolio easier. Additionally, demo data is easily transportable to the theme in a click.
The images in the projects come with the ability to view them in the full size (in slider mode), download, share, zoom in and out, etc (however, a couple of tooltips for all these buttons wouldn’t be redundant). You may create password-protected areas for specific galleries using this theme.
Persona
Persona is a wonderful WordPress theme for personal photography projects as well as agencies. Its design can be also considered as multipurpose – you’ll be able to build a stylish magazine or blog, a freelancer portfolio or just a rich collection of categorized photos (or combine everything in one theme).
Elegant white color scheme and readable typography will serve any of those needs in the professional and creative manner. The dark skin is also offered. Masonry, grid, fullscreen and horizontal gallery layouts are your options.
As for some extra tools, Persona theme offers WooCommerce integration to help you sell your works, Google fonts collection, Contact Form 7 plugin, and one-click demo data installation. So, you may feel fully armed and supported working with this theme!
Cameo Photography
Cameo Photography theme is a stylish theme with elegant layout and different layouts for any creative photography idea – home full page, Masonry, shift slider, etc. To create any other site page, you’ll be able to simply choose from 36 pre-made layouts. So many creative ideas! You won’t need to rack your brain to construct anything sophisticated. The hamburger menu is a great choice for improving the UX and providing a handy navigation across a variety of devices, including Retina.
The overall theme is pretty fast-loading and is full of different handy tools like Contact form 7, Page Builder, one-click demo installation, etc.
Pix
Pix is a nice dark-style theme for photographers, designers and illustrators. It comes with 11 great home page demos for different tastes and concepts, cute animation effects and lots of portfolio listing types.
Looks like this theme is one of the most suitable ones in terms of customization richness, so if you dream to be the boss of every tiny portfolio part, Pix theme will give you this freedom. A very interesting standout of this theme is a number of attractive portfolio hover styles, customizable grid spaces, different pagination types inside portfolios, a diversity of overlay styles, informative details page types, and much more.
Tempus
Tempus is a great lightweight photography theme that comes with multiple demos for the front page and is very much suitable for rich photo blogging. However, it’s also supplied with multiple layouts for the portfolio itself. The theme is absolutely perfect for freelancers, agencies, photographers, cinematographers, videographers and other creative fields.
The design of pages is maximum clean, with the emphasis on your content, making it really easy to grab and hold people’s attention. A lot of beautiful wide-screen and grid designs for the portfolio and several blog layouts will help you reach a really desirable online presentation.
The theme is not overloaded with shortcodes, but the list of portfolio options is just huge.
Iso50
A great theme for photographers and creative studios. It features impressive typography, different concepts with outstanding layouts for showcasing your photos, and a lot of customization options. In addition to creating the layouts of your dreams for photos, you may play with a lot of different things like header layouts, manage footer columns, change fonts, colors, etc.
The theme supports one-click demo installation, responsive layouts and a number of shortcodes to add any desirable and trendy feature to your site.
Overall, the theme is quite stylish and powerful to give you everything required for pain-free website building.
Conclusions
The niche of WordPress photography themes is really oversaturated and sometimes picking a simple elegant portfolio is hard, because you are getting lost in all the needed and unneeded features the theme may offer. So it’s better to start with a simple design and then add only those particular features you’ll need. Are you a lucky owner of any of the themes? Share your experience with others in comments.
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