In today’s post we’re going to look at how you can easily create a video gallery on your WordPress website via a short list of free and premium plugins. Whether you want to create a curated video website, show off a gallery of your work, or simple include a gallery of pertinent videos within an existing blog post–these tools will have you covered.

Huge-It Video Gallery

The first plugin that I want to show you today is Video Gallery by Huge-It. This plugin is about as simple and straightforward as you can get for a video gallery plugin, right out of the box. However, if you want more customizability you’ll have to upgrade to their premium version which starts at $20.

Here is a quick example of how I was able to use it to populate my sample website’s homepage with a video gallery. After installing the free version of the plugin, which you can find in the official WordPress Plugin Directory, I navigated to the new Video Gallery menu in my admin’s sidebar.

To create a new gallery I simply had to click the Add New Video Gallery button and begin to paste the appropriate youtube and/or vimeo links, as seen below.

For each new video you would like to add, simply click the Add New Slide button and insert the appropriate data: title, description, and url. However, it should be noted that there are actually two url fields. One for the actual video link and the other for the title/source (if you want to add one).

When you’re ready to insert your gallery into a post or page, just copy-and-paste the shortcode from the sidebar section of the gallery building page into the location you would like it to appear.

Once you click save or publish and view the front side, you’ll see a gallery like this one.

When it’s all said and done, this plugin is insanely easy to to use and implement. However, it’s unfortunate flaw is that literally anything besides the out-of-box settings are part of the premium plugin. So if you want to make each video a little bit wider, have a border, adjust the colors of text, etc. then it’ll cost you.

WordPress Video Gallery

Up next we have a plugin called WordPress Video Gallery by Apptha (though it also goes by Contus Video Gallery within the plugin itself). It promises to be “the most exciting Video Gallery for your WordPress site”. Which they seem to translate as meaning a Dailymotion style layout with one large featured video at the top and a gallery displayed beneath it (by category and “popular” or “featured”) for the rest.

Comparatively, this is a robust plugin with many settings still adjustable in the free version, but with a few hard pushes towards the pro version at $99. The biggest “push” being the fact that unless you upgrade to the pro version there is a watermark for “contus video gallery free version” that must be displayed in one of the corners of your video. For anyone serious about their own branding, this will be a huge turn off. However, if you try out the free version and like it enough to upgrade, then it’s a non-issue. So lets take a look at getting a new gallery page up and running with this plugin.

After installing the plugin, the first thing you’ll want to do is navigate to the new Video Gallery sidebar menu in your admin. Under All Videos you will see that this plugin is set up a lot like a custom post type menu might be set up. There is a “post archive” section where you can add new videos as well as see the videos already added. You can also use the tabs at the top of the page to add new video categories, video ads, configure settings, or use Google Adsense. You’ll also want to notice the “How to Use?” drop-down. This will explain how you can use the various shortcodes and parameters they’ve provided to properly display your video galleries on the front-end of your website.

 

Upon installation this plugin automatically creates a videos page called Videos that is pre-populated with sample content. Since they use video links to either YouTube, Viddler, or DailyMotion (instead of uploading the video files) having all of this sample content automatically added isn’t going to slow your website down–just give you a better idea of how best to use it. Like the Huge-It plugin, displaying your content is done via shortcode. Either on the Video page the plugin creates or a page/post of your own choosing. Just be sure to place the [videohome] shortcode where you’d like your main video page content to display.

To enable your visitors to visit “archive” pages for the pre-defined Popular, Recent, and Featured videos simply use the shortcodes provided to create the corresponding pages.

Huzzaz Video Gallery

Ironically enough, the plugin I’ve saved for last is one I initially didn’t even include in this post. Why? Because its only purpose is to allow you to use a shortcode that embeds the video gallery for a third party platform–that of of huzzaz.com: a relatively new online app for collecting, sharing and discovering video. When I realized this I thought to myself that someone within the WordPress community would have surely figured out a better way to offer free video galleries of just about any video on the web, all within the WordPress, and this plugin would seem silly to include. I was wrong. This plugin and its accompanying platform Huzzaz, whether new and unknown or not, turned out to be my favorite method of the three plugins showcased in this post for creating a quick and easy responsive video gallery for WordPress with little to no fuss.

So, how does it work?

First, you have to create an account on Huzzaz, which you can do with one-click via facebook login (or the other options provided). Then, download and install the Huzzaz Video Gallery plugin from the official WordPress Plugin Directory. After that, go back to the Huzzaz website and create your video collection.

For our example I was able to quickly wrangled up some cat videos.

Next, click the embed symbol on the right hand side. You’ll see a pop-up like the one below.

As you can see there are some very basic styling options available. When satisfied with your customizations, make sure the WordPress option is active, highlight the generated shortcode and copy it into the desired location on your WordPress website. It will result in a responsive video gallery that fits the full-width of the given area, as seen below.

Simple as that. And with only one subtle “powered by” link at the bottom. If you’d like to get rid of even that small link, you can do so by upgrading to the pro version, which also adds some legitimately nice display and sharing options. For me, this one “just worked” a bit better than the other two options–although Huge-It is a very close second.

Bonus: Use the Elegant Themes Gallery Page Template

 

For all of you who are currently using an Elegant Theme and may or may not want to mess with any additional plugins, you can always use the gallery page template. How? Like this!

Using any Elegant Theme that you have installed, create a new page. Then, in the sidebar of that page’s editor under Page Attributes, select the Gallery Template. This type of setup will pull specific posts from your blog and display them as a gallery. If you do not want to display these posts in both places (your blog and your gallery) you can simply exclude the categories you want to include in your gallery from your blog.

Once the Gallery page template is selected you will notice that underneath it you will be able to select the number of posts per page and the categories you would like to use. Configure those settings, click publish, and view your new gallery–which should look like the example above.

If for any reason that is not how things look or you did not understand my instructions, there is an extremely easy to follow video tutorial on using the Elegant Themes page templates you can watch.

What About Divi?

What if you are using Elegant Themes’ newest and most popular theme Divi? In that case, it’s a bit different. But also a bit better. Here is what you do:

In your WordPress admin navigate to Projects > Add New. Add your video here just like you would in a regular blog post. Next, in either a page or post where you are using the Divi Page builder, select any of the portfolio options and configure your preferences. In this way you will be able to construct a few different types of video galleries.

In Conclusion

WordPress is a highly flexible platform that can be used to showcase any type of content imaginable. Even though web video is often dominated by sites like YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion and a few other massive outlets, there is still room for individual sites/blogs to build a community around quality video. In this post, between existing plugins and Elegant Theme functionality, we’ve learned five different ways you can use WordPress to show off your video portfolios and/or curated collections. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them in the comments below.

thumbnail image via Anikei / shutterstock.com

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