radogado

Rado’s Native Lightbox instantly upgrades every WordPress gallery into a beautiful, full-screen lightbox carousel. Just activate and go — your existing galleries are transformed automatically, no shortcodes to learn, no settings pages to configure.
Built on <a href="https://nativecarousel.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">Native Carousel</a>, it uses the browser’s own scroll-snapping instead of heavy animation libraries. The result is buttery-smooth swiping on phones, fluid keyboard navigation on desktops, and a total footprint of roughly 13 KB — smaller than a single thumbnail image.
Why this plugin?
<ul>
<li>Zero configuration — activate it and every gallery on your site becomes a lightbox carousel. Deactivate it and galleries revert to normal. Nothing is written to your database.</li>
<li>Truly lightweight — ~13 KB total (JS + CSS). No jQuery, no frameworks, no external requests. Your PageSpeed score stays intact.</li>
<li>Works with any theme — Twenty Twenty-Five, Astra, GeneratePress, or anything else. The plugin bundles everything it needs.</li>
<li>Accessible by default — full keyboard navigation, focus trapping in the lightbox, screen-reader labels on every control, and <code>prefers-reduced-motion</code> support.</li>
<li>Native scroll-snap — hardware-accelerated, 60 fps swiping powered by the browser itself, not JavaScript animation loops.</li>
<li>Dark mode aware — the lightbox overlay adapts to the visitor’s system color scheme automatically.</li>
</ul>
Features at a glance:
<ul>
<li>Full-screen lightbox with swipe, keyboard and mouse-wheel navigation</li>
<li>Compact thumbnail index strip with scrollable overflow</li>
<li>“Thumbnails only” toggle in both the Block Editor sidebar and Classic Editor settings</li>
<li>Endless (infinite loop) navigation</li>
<li>Lazy-loaded images with low-resolution placeholder blur while loading</li>
<li>Captions and alt text fully preserved</li>
<li>Featured-image click opens the matching gallery slide on single posts</li>
<li>Editor performance guard — caps image sizes in the block editor to prevent crashes with large galleries</li>
</ul>
How it works:
The plugin intercepts gallery rendering at display time and outputs <a href="https://nativecarousel.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">Native Carousel</a> HTML markup. Your post content is never modified — the transformation is purely visual and fully reversible.
<h3>Third-party source code</h3>
This plugin bundles minified assets from Native Carousel, an open-source carousel component (GPL-2.0-or-later).
<ul>
<li>Homepage & documentation: <a href="https://nativecarousel.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">https://nativecarousel.com/</a></li>
<li>Source code repository: <a href="https://github.com/radogado/n-carousel" rel="nofollow ugc">https://github.com/radogado/n-carousel</a></li>
</ul>
The following files in <code>assets/</code> are the minified production builds:
<ul>
<li><code>n-carousel.min.js</code> — carousel runtime</li>
<li><code>n-carousel-preload.min.js</code> — image preloader</li>
<li><code>n-carousel.min.css</code> — carousel styles</li>
</ul>
The unminified, human-readable source is available in the GitHub repository linked above. No build tools are needed to work with this plugin’s own code — <code>gallery-lightbox.css</code> and the admin JavaScript files are shipped unminified and readable.
This plugin is also maintained as part of the niui theme project: 
<a href="https://gitlab.com/spacest/niui/-/tree/main/rados-native-lightbox" rel="nofollow ugc">https://gitlab.com/spacest/niui/-/tree/main/rados-native-lightbox</a>

Rado's Native Lightbox

Transforms WordPress galleries into lightweight lightbox carousels. Works with any theme — only ~13 KB.

Nauris

Building a photography portfolio for WordPress should be easy. Here’s a plugin to help you with that!
<h3>Quick Overview</h3>
Easy Photography Portfolio is based on the idea of albums with images that can optionally be grouped in categories! 
By default, albums and images are displayed in a masonry gallery. You open up an album to see all the images. then click on an image to look at it closer. 
I think it might be easier to explain with a demo.
<h3>Plugin Demo</h3>
Easy Photography Portfolio is extremely flexible, from the most basic to completely custom designs.
📌 Demo: Minimalist Portfolio
<a href="https://wordpress.org/themes/minimalist-portfolio/" rel="ugc">Minimalist Portfolio</a> is a free WordPress theme – customized to look great with Easy Photography Portfolio plugin!
<ul>
<li><a href="http://befree.pyronaur.com/" rel="nofollow ugc">Minimalist Portfolio Demo</a></li>
<li><a href="https://colormelon.com/free-portfolio-website-tutorial/" rel="nofollow ugc">Tutorial</a> – full theme and plugin setup</li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/pyronaur/minimalist-portfolio" rel="nofollow ugc">Source Code</a> on GitHub</li>
</ul>
<h3>📚 Setup Tutorials</h3>
The plugin name gave it away – it’s really easy to set up a portfolio with it. And yet, here are some extra resources for you:
<ul>
<li><a href="https://colormelon.com/easy-photography-portfolio-full-setup-guide/" rel="nofollow ugc">Full setup guide</a> – as close to documentation as you can get</li>
<li><a href="https://colormelon.com/free-portfolio-website-tutorial/" rel="nofollow ugc">A-Z Photography Portfolio tutorial</a> with Hamilton child theme (Minimalist Portfolio)</li>
</ul>
<h3>🎥 Video Tutorial</h3>
If detailed documentation and guides aren’t enough for you, watch the video tutorial: 
<iframe loading="lazy" class="youtube-player" width="750" height="422" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/b5mevuD-hPI?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent" allowfullscreen="true" style="border:0;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox"></iframe>
<h3>Designed for Photographers</h3>
We love the WordPress community and wholeheartedly agree with the <a href="https://wordpress.org/about/philosophy/" rel="ugc">WordPress Philosophy</a>.
Great software should work out of the box, without the user having to adjust oceans of buttons and knobs. 
That’s why Photography Portfolio is designed to be as easy to use as possible.
Photography Portfolio plugin is founded upon years of experience in building Premium WordPress Themes for Photographers. We’ve seen it all, great and not-so-great websites, big names, and absolute beginners. We have crystallized the formula of a high-quality portfolio into a simple WordPress plugin that you can use with any WordPress theme or your custom WordPress site!
It all comes down to the simple structure of a real Portfolio book.
You own a Portfolio album for, let’s say your Wedding Photography. If you happen to do street Photography too, you also probably have another album that has only your best street photography prints.
That’s exactly what Photography Portfolio does for you online. You create albums, add images, and in case you have a huge portfolio, you can categorize albums too.
Then your visitors are able to open any album, quickly scan all of the images, or view them one by one. Simplicity is key!
<h3>Developed for Extensibility</h3>
Out of the box, Photography Portfolio is built using Masonry Layout (think Pinterest). Quite simply – it’s the layout most easily portable to any website layout while keeping the feel of the brand.
Warning: Developer language ahead. 
For some, a masonry layout might not be enough, it sure isn’t enough for our Photography WordPress themes, because of that, this plugin is packed with Actions and Filters. Not only in PHP but also the JavaScript side. 
You can easily extend the plugin with your own custom archive and single-view layouts. Customization is easy as Photography Portfolio plugin templates are based on <code>get_template_part()</code> function, similar to the way WooCommerce plugin has a custom template function. That brings a lot of customization power to the table. Pick any part of the view, and append your own template bits or completely rewrite the templates.
The JavaScript side is also very opinionated and easily extensible. You can use filters and actions to either modify the existing functionality, for example modifying the core masonry layout just a bit or completely initialize a brand new layout (like Packery or Horizontal Scroll). If you decide to build a custom view, you can utilize the existing JavaScript hook structure to let the plugin handle all the little things for you.

Easy Photography Portfolio

I tested a lot of portfolio plugins and they look all quite ugly - or you need to pay for boring effects. Photography Portfolio looks great. And it’s very simple to use. 

If you know how to manage templates, customisation is possible and that’s the kind of feature that makes a great difference. Too bad the documentation is not very noob friendly as the time I’m writing this review. I hope it will be completed.

Efficient, simple and good looking

Easy Photography Portfolio is an elegant portfolio gallery plugin designed for Photographers. Install the plugin, add portfolio entries and galleries  …

Rado's Native Lightbox vs Easy Photography Portfolio