Modula Gallery Review – A Gorgeous WordPress Photo Gallery Plugin

There are a ton of WordPress gallery plugins out there. By my last count, the number is somewhere between one to two million (slight hyperbole), which means the stakes are high when it comes to choosing a gallery solution for your WordPress site.

In my Modula Gallery review, I’ll try to lessen those stakes by giving you a peek at a neat freemium gallery plugin that offers everything from filterable categories to gorgeous styling effects and more. All for one low price.

Overall, Modula Gallery is a well-designed gallery plugin that’s easy to use for beginners, but flexible enough for users with advanced needs.

Modula Gallery Review: The Feature List

Ok, let’s start at the beginning. Here’s what you get when you go with Modula Gallery Pro for your WordPress site:

  • Unlimited galleries
  • Filterable categories for galleries (I’ll show you this in a second)
  • Rotation and slide effects
  • Built-in social sharing buttons
  • Detailed control over margins and other styling effects
  • 12 different hover effects
  • 6 different types of lightbox galleries

And to give you an idea of the types of galleries that you can create with Modula Gallery, here are a couple of screenshots:
 

Modula Gallery example

A gallery with margins between pictures and using the hover effect

 

A gallery with zero margins between images

Hands-on With Modula Gallery

As far as feature lists go, it’s got everything you need in a WordPress photo gallery plugin. But how about the actual functionality? Does that match up with the impressive feature list? Let’s find out.

Once you install and activate the plugin, you can dive straight into the Modula tab. The process of creating a photo gallery basically works like this:

  • You create your gallery using the Modula interface
  • You choose photos, category filters, styles, margins, etc.
  • Modula grid gallery spits out a shortcode that you can use to insert your gallery anywhere in your site

Step 1: Create Your Gallery in Modula

To get started, you head to the Modula tab in your dashboard sidebar and choose Add Gallery. Then, you’ll set up the basic options for your gallery by choosing its width (a percentage) and its height (in pixels) as well as giving it a name and internal description:
 
Modula gallery review - Hands-on

Then, you choose where to pull your images’ titles and captions from. You can pull from a variety of areas in the normal WordPress interface (e.g. the title field, description field, etc.) which is nice because you don’t need to duplicate any of the work you’ve already put into categorizing your media library.

You can also choose your hover effect here:


 

Step 2: Add Your Gallery Images

Next up, it’s time to actually add your images. You’ll first specify a minimum width or height for the images, and then you can either select existing images from your WordPress media library or upload new ones.

And to rearrange the order of your photos, all you need to do is drag and drop:

Drag and drop photos

I enjoyed how simple this step was – it’s really quick to get your photos inserted and ordered.

At this point, your gallery can be done. If you don’t want to do any custom styling, all you need to do is grab the shortcode.

But I want to get the full experience for this review, so I’ll click the button to customize my gallery in more detail:
 
Customize gallery
 

Step 3: Customize Your Gallery

If you go to the Edit Gallery page, you can change pretty much everything about your gallery:
 
Edit Gallery

For example, to customize the social share buttons for your gallery, you just need to pop into the Social tab and you can choose which networks to use, as well as some basic color options:
 
Social Gallery

And if you want to get detailed with the style of your gallery, you can use easy option sliders to adjust important details like borders and shadow:
 
Borders and Shadows
 

Step 4: Adding Filters For Image Sorting

One key differentiating feature for Modula Gallery is that it lets you create Filters for your images. With Filters, you can basically assign categories to your gallery items.

Then, visitors can quickly click on one of the categories to filter the images from just that category. You can make the filtering happen either with or without a page reload.

To show you how it works, I’ll add a couple of Filters to my gallery:

Add Filters to Gallery

 
Then, all you need to do is assign your gallery items to one or more of the filters:
 

Assign Gallery Items to Filters
 
And you’re ready to publish your gallery!

Step 5: Publish Your Gallery

To publish your gallery, all you need to do is paste the shortcode into the post or page where you want your gallery to appear. Or, you can also use the new Modula button in the WordPress Editor to insert the shortcode:

Insert Shortcode

And then, your gallery will show up on the front-end:
 
Gallery Front-End

And if you were to, say, click on the filter for just landscape pictures, you’d see it instantly sorted like this:
 
Sorted for Landscape Pictures

And if you click on an individual image (and had lightbox enabled), it would pop up according to your lightbox gallery style:
 
Lightbox Preview
 

Final Thoughts and Pricing

When you use Modula Gallery, you can tell that the developers have put a ton of care into the plugin. With things like smooth scrolling in the settings panel and satisfying CSS effects when you check a box, they went above and beyond to make Modula Gallery enjoyable to use.

I also like that they give you choices when it comes to how much time you need to invest in your gallery.

Just want to set up a really quick gallery? You can grab the shortcode after about 30 seconds of work and instantly make your gallery public.

Want full control over your gallery? You can continue on to the detailed settings and customize everything about how your gallery works.

With prices starting at just $19 for a single site license, it’s also significantly more affordable than the competition. And there’s also a limited free version if you want to get a taste without cracking open your wallet.

All in all, if you’re in the market for a WordPress photo gallery plugin, consider giving Modula Gallery a try.

This post may contain affiliate links, which means Nimbus Themes may receive compensation if you make a purchase using these links.

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About the Author

Colin Newcomer is a freelance blogger for hire with a background in SEO and affiliate marketing. He helps clients grow their web visibility by writing primarily about digital marketing, WordPress, and B2B topics.

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