22 Great WordPress Plugins for Managing Images (Updated)

Are you looking for the best plugins to manage images on your WordPress site? Images help bring life to your content and boost engagement. In this article, we will share some of the best WordPress plugins for managing images more efficiently on your website.

1. Envira Gallery

Envira Gallery is the best WordPress photo gallery plugin in the market. It allows you to create beautiful and mobile-responsive image galleries in WordPress with just a few clicks.

Envira is optimized for performance, so your galleries load fast. It is also the most SEO friendly photo gallery plugin for WordPress. Envira has tons of features like albums, image tagging, watermarking, proofing, and so on.

There is also a WooCommerce addon which allows you to add an online store to sell your photos.

2. Soliloquy

Sliders allow you to drive user’s attention to your most important content with beautiful image slideshows accompanied by text, call to action, and animation. However, Sliders can also slow down your website speed which affects user experience and SEO.

Soliloquy is the best WordPress slider in the market today. It is noticeably faster than any other WordPress slider. It is also the most easy to use with tons of features like featured content slider, carousel, slider themes, lightbox, etc.

3. EWWW Image Optimizer

Images take longer to load than text, and this affects your website speed and performance. The best way to deal with this is by optimizing your images for the web.

EWWW Image Optimizer is the best WordPress plugin to automatically optimize your images in WordPress. It comes with powerful tools to compress images without affecting quality.

Alternative: WP Smush

4. Smart Slider 3

Smart Slider 3 is available as both paid and free WordPress slider plugin. It comes with a beautiful drag and drop customizer which allows you to quickly create a slideshow.

It is easy to use and includes a ton of features like animations, beautiful transitions, mobile-friendly slider, and more.

5. Imsanity

Imsanity allows you to set a maximum image height and width for WordPress uploads and automatically resizes large image files. It can also perform bulk resize on older uploads based on your settings.

For detailed instructions see our guide on how to bulk resize large images in WordPress

6. Require Featured Image

Sometimes you or another author on your site may forget to add a featured image to the blog post before publishing. This may affect your site’s layout, and if you are automatically sharing posts on social media, then those sites will just pick any image from the article as post thumbnail.

Require Featured Image plugin does not let you publish a post until you add a featured image. It will remind you that you haven’t added a featured image and will disable the publish button until you add a featured image.

For more details, see our guide on how to require featured images for posts in WordPress.

7. Default Featured Image

As the name suggests, this handy plugin allows you to easily set a default featured image to use as fallback for posts that do not have a featured image available. Simply install and activate the plugin, and then head over to Settings Β» Media page to upload a default image.

For alternate methods, see our article on how to set a default fallback featured image in WordPress.

8. Featured Video Plus

This plugin allows you to add a featured video to your WordPress instead of a featured image. Simply add the video URL, and it will automatically fetch the video thumbnail. It supports YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Soundcloud, Spotify, etc.

For more details, see our guide on how to add featured video thumbnails in WordPress.

9. Image Widget

Normally, if you want to add an image to your WordPress sidebar you will have to manually add it inside a text widget using HTML. Image Widget plugin adds a widget that you can drag and drop to a sidebar and then select or upload an image.

For detailed instructions, take a look at our article on how to add an image in WordPress sidebar widget.

10. Featured Images in RSS & Mailchimp Email

As the name suggests, this plugin enables featured images for your RSS feed. If you are using MailChimp to send posts via email to your subscribers, then those users will also see featured images for posts.

For an alternate method, see our tutorial on how to add featured images to WordPress RSS feed.

11. Regenerate Thumbnails

When you upload an image, WordPress automatically saves it into multiple sizes. These sizes are defined in Settings Β» Media page. WordPress themes can also add their own image sizes to be used for thumbnails. If you activate such a theme, WordPress will start saving images in those new sizes as well. However, it will not recreate new sizes for older images.

Regenerate thumbnail allows you to quickly regenerate all image sizes in WordPress. For detailed instructions, please take a look at our guide on how to regenerate thumbnails and new image sizes in WordPress.

12. External Media

This plugin allows you to link or import files from Dropbox, Box, OneDrive, Google Drive, Instagram and any other external file into WordPress. This offers you an easier way to work on images stored on your Google Drive or Dropbox accounts by accessing them directly from WordPress.

For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to connect Google Drive to your WordPress media library.

13. Post Thumbnail Editor

After uploading a featured image, sometimes you’d notice that WordPress has cropped it, or it is not showing up correctly with your theme. You can edit the image in your favorite image editing program, or you can use this plugin.

Post Thumbnail Editor allows you to easily crop and resize featured images from your WordPress admin area. You can also edit previously uploaded featured images. For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to crop and edit WordPress post thumbnails.

14. Easy Watermark

Easy Watermark allows you to easily add watermarking to your WordPress images. You can choose to automatically watermark all images or manually add watermark to specific images.

If you are already using Envira Gallery, then you don’t need this plugin. You can use Envira’s watermarking addon instead.

See step by step instructions on using both plugins in our guide on how to automatically add watermark to images in WordPress

15. Simple Full Screen Background Image

Simple Full Screen Background Image allows you to easily add full screen background image to any WordPress theme. Many WordPress themes already allow you to easily add full screen background images. However, if your theme does not support full screen background images, then you can try this plugin.

For step by step instructions, see our tutorial on how to add a fullscreen background image in WordPress.

16. WP First Letter Avatar

WP First Letter Avatar allows you to show a custom avatar using the first letter of user’s name. You can show it only for users who don’t have a Gravatar image or completely replace Gravatar with first letter avatars.

Learn more about it in our guide on how to set custom avatar for users in WordPress.

17. Taxonomy Images

Do you want to add image icons or thumbnails to your categories or tags? Taxonomy Images allows you to do just that. After activating the plugin, simply go to Posts Β» Categories page and click on the add button to upload your images.

For detailed instructions, check out our guide on how to add taxonomy images in WordPress.

18. Media File Renamer

Ever wanted to change the file name of an image after uploading it? WordPress allows you to change image title and alt text, but you cannot change the file name. Media File Renamer plugin allows you to easily change any file name in WordPress media library. It also automatically rename file names based on file title you enter during upload.

Renaming a file using the plugin also updates all references to the file in your WordPress posts and pages. For more details, see our guide on how to rename image and media files in WordPress.

19. ImageInject

Most beginners have difficulty finding copyright free images for their blog posts. ImageInject plugin solves this problem by allowing you to search Flickr for creative commons licensed photos and add them to your posts with proper attribution.

For detailed instructions, take a look at our article on how to find and add creative commons licensed images in WordPress.

20. Enable Media Replace

If you have to replace an image in your WordPress posts, normally you’d have to edit the post to add your new image and removing the old one. If you have used that image in multiple posts, then you will have to edit all those posts to add new image.

Enable Media Replace plugin allows you to replace media files directly from the WordPress media library. Replacing an image automatically replaces it on your posts and pages where you have added the old image.

See our guide on how to easily replace images and media files in WordPress.

21. Plugin A/B Image Optimizer

Featured images attract users to click on your articles. Ever wondered what kind of featured images work best on your site? A/B Image Optimizer plugin helps you figure this out. It allows you to add two featured images for a post and then it randomly shows those images to your users. You can see which featured image got more clicks by editing a post.

For more details, take a look at our guide on how to A/B split test featured images in WordPress.

22. Instagram Feed

Want to show your Instagram photos on your WordPress site? Instagram Feed allows you to easily display your Instagram feed using a sidebar widget or shortcode. Simply connect your website to your Instagram account, and it will automatically pull your feed. You can customize the feed using different display options in plugin settings.

If you’re using Envira Gallery, then you can do this with their Instagram addon.

Bonus Tools

These tools are not WordPress plugins, but they can help you improve the quality of images on your WordPress site.

23. Canva

Canva allows you to create all kind of graphics with easy to use drag and drop tools.It comes with professional looking templates that you can use as a starting point. You can also purchase stock images, icons, and other resources directly from the app.

24. Shutterstock

Shutterstock is one of the largest online resource for stock photography, clipart, illustrations, and vector graphics. We are a customer of Shutterstock and can vouch for the quality of images.

For more tools you may want to see our list of 16 tools to create better images for your blog posts

That’s all for now.

We hope this article helped you discover great WordPress plugins to manage images on your website. You may also want to see our how to fix common image issues in WordPress.

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