If you have explored this site you may be wondering how I’ve created the beautiful picture and video popup effects. The answer to this is of course Plugins! There are lots of video and picture plugins out there and unfortunately lots of plugins that promise the world and deliver an unattractive interfact and unreliable performance.
Luckily I’ve waded through the sea of mediocrity to find the cream of the crop. My choices are:
NextGen Gallery for pictures
A very attractive and intuitive plugin that allows you to embed thumbnails that enlarge with a sexy zoom effect e.g.
[nggallery id=1]
To embed it in a page you use a simple shortcode, alternatively use the Widget to add to a sidebar.
The main drawback is that you need to upload images separately to NextGen Gallery folders rather than being able to use already uploaded images.
After uploading the images you can:
- Customise the size they appear
- Use tags to create custom albums without reuploading
- Choose how many images to appear
Tubepress for Videos
Tubepress allows you to embed thumbnail galleries of Youtube and Vimeo in lots of cool ways. You can display a gallery of videos, automatically load a video in large size at the top, play the videos embedded in the page or play them in a popup window. It also has a flexible Widget that comes with it.
The nicest part of the plugin is the variety of different ways that you can choose which videos you show. You can show all videos from a single uploader, all videos liked by a Youtube or Vimeo account, use search terms to filter for relevant content.
Just remember if you use it with Vimeo nothing will work until you configure the API
Tubepress in Action
[tubepress mode=”vimeoLikes” vimeoLikesValue=”user6698474″ theme=”vimeo” hqThumbs=”true” resultCountCap=”15″]
Have you tried these plugins and if so what do you think?