Envira is a great way to create easy WordPress download galleries.
Envira Gallery is a WordPress plugin for, you guessed it, photo galleries. Here are the steps for creating an Envira download gallery for your images.
After photographing a scholarship award event last weekend, my client wanted me to post a public gallery where the students could download the photos as they received their awards (each student was photographed with a local sports figure along with an executive from the corporation giving the scholarships).
This was a perfect time to set up Envira and create my first gallery for a client.
Envira Download Gallery: The Plan
The requirements for this sort of gallery are pretty straightforward:
- No password protection needed
- Images should be downloadable
- No ecommerce integration needed
- Easy social sharing would be a nice bonus
This is all pretty simple with the base Envira Gallery plugin for WordPress along with a few addons. The addons used are:
- Social Addon (for sharing to Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest)
- Downloads Addon (to enable visitors to download the images)
- Deeplinking Addon (to allow someone to share a link directly to a single image rather than the gallery)
Envira offers a few different price points depending on the features you need; we’ll want the Pro plan to give us what we need for this use case (as well as many other situations).
Once you have Envira installed, go to the Addons menu and activate the addons we’ll need:
Envira Download Gallery: Configuration
With those addons activated, you’re just a few quick checkboxes away from having a download gallery. You’ll want to create a gallery and upload your images as usual, then go to a couple settings panels to enable the options for downloads and social sharing.
On the downloads panel, enable the checkbox to allow downloads from the gallery and (optionally) the lightbox view. You can also choose if you want to limit downloads to a particular image resolution, or allow them to download the high-res file.
On the social panel, choose which social networks you’d like folks to be able to share – in my case I chose Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. Seemed like a good fit for this younger crowd.
That’s it – you have a basic photo gallery from which anyone can download images or share them to social networks. Envira Gallery makes it easy to set up download galleries with WordPress, which is why I’m an affiliate partner (so if you click through my links here, and buy Envira, you pay the regular price and I get a small commission).
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