I’ll not unveil a secret if recommend you to use more photos in your websites. According to 3M Corporation, 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visual information is processed 60,000 times faster in the brain than text.
One of the huge trends of 2016 is to showcase multiple images without overburdening the users. In this blog I’ll share with you some great tools to achieve effective gallery views at your websites.
Masonry Photo Gallery View
Masonry (also known as Pinterest style layout) is a grid layout based on columns, it doesn’t have fixed height for rows. It’s great option for optimising website space, as it reduces any unnecessary gaps.
You can check these websites for amazing masonry galleries:
Pinterest.com
Thereason.us
Erik Johansson Photgraphy
These examples show how effective galleries are when build in masonry view. You can use this layout to show photos, portfolio items and even blog posts. This layout is also widely used for displaying Instagram feed images in the website. You can see a sample checking our Instagram feed plugin with masonry layout.To get the best of masonry layout please consider to have images of different sizes and also multiple images greatly enhance the effectiveness of this view.
If you want to use this view in your next website, please take into consideration that generating this layout considers some advanced calculation so achieving this view from scratch will not be a very good decision. You need to have some advanced coding knowledge for creating responsive masonry layout. Besides, there are some great WordPress plugins which support Masonry view, so you can just choose one of them and have the amazing Masonry layout easily.
Here are some recommended plugins which support Masonry view. While deciding which one to choose, take into consideration that all of them will display the gallery almost the same way, you should just think what other features have each of them like lightbox, social sharing buttons, transition effects, etc.
Slideshow with Thumbnail FilmStrips
Slideshows are widely used in website development nowadays. But if you want to suggest your users something new and attractive then it’s better to showcase a big thing along with small hints of what you have to come yet. This is the logic of filmstrip slideshows: first comes a large photo and in vertical and/or horizontal position appear filmstrip thumbnails.
Below are some great tools which support filmstrip slideshows, while deciding which one to buy, you should consider how flexible this option is. You should at least be able to set filmstrip position and define thumbnail sizes.
Slider with Interactive Thumbnails
This is a quite new layout for me, and I even don’t know how it is called officially, but I’m sure this is something you’ll like. Thumbnails appear on large slides, you can slide and see more bunch of nice thumbnail photos. Moreover, on hover you’ll see description of each small image and on click it opens a simple yet elegant lightbox.
Really nice and creative layout solution for showcasing galleries. For now I have seen this view only with the plugin Instashow. This is the default view of this product for showing Instagram feed.
Carousel Layout
The carousel method displays multiple items in a carousel-like layout. It is designed to present components in one view with the ability to switch between them by clicking on the dedicated buttons or by swipe navigation (on touch devices). It is a great solution when you are lack of large space but have a lot to show. Though carousel view is not something new in design world but latest carousel layout implementations are really fantastic, especially the 3d effects.
Unlike masonry or filmstrip layouts when the final result is almost the same with different plugins, for carousel layout the final result may be quite different depending on the plugin. Some of the plugins use standard carousels while others suggest crazy 3d implementations as you see in the sample photos.
To achieve nice carousel views try the following plugins:
This is the list of some advanced photo gallery views that I have decided to share with you today. Of course there are a lot of other gallery layouts available like mosaic, blog style, thumbnails, image browser, but I wanted to select out those which are modern looking, not too famous yet and the ones that claim to be a huge trend in 2016. If you know some other great gallery layouts please be kind to share with us in comments, we’d add them to our list .
But besides of taking into account how your gallery looks, you should consider how it feels. No matter which tool you will choose for getting the desired look always make sure that it has smooth and swipe navigation between the photos. This is what really matters and this is what we consider first when creating our products.
