8 useful plugins for Photog bloggers

WordPress plugins for photobloggers – that’s what today’s Tech Tuesday is all about.

We are talking about some nuts-and-bolts type plugins that are helpful for photographers using WordPress and are geared towards making your life easier – and hopefully allow you to spend less time updating your blog and more time behind the camera.

If you are not familiar with WordPress, you maybe literally been living under a rock -not much I can do about that other than to say give it a try, you won’t regret it.  I’ve made my living the last 4 years off of WordPress customization and custom plugins – not to get too “preachy” but its an amazing platform and it’s ability to use plugins has made it all the better.  We as photographers should utilize such things, right?!

Here we go.  More after the jump…

1.  Akismet – (get it here)

You can tell I’m not going in any sort of order when Akismet shows up first on the list.

Akismet is an amazing API that, if used correctly, pretty much eliminates spam on your site.  As far as I know, Akismet was designed by angels, or at least some higher-power that knows how much I hate deleting spam comments.  Akismet kicks spam in the face…repeatedly.  If you think you don’t need this plugin, just wait two weeks.  A blog without Akismet is close to the textbook definition of a tragedy.

2.  Contact Form 7 – (get it here)

Another Contact form plugin for WordPress – simple and flexible.

Here’s the deal, in the last 5 years I’ve gone through about 20+ contact form plugins, heck, I even wrote my own once.  This one is the best one that I have found so far – and it works.  This is a great plugin for those of you who want to quickly add functionality to your contact page.  I’ve always found that the less steps I require my users to take to get in touch with me, the more likely they are to do just that.  Do everyone a favor, and make it easy as possible.

3. SEO Friendly Images – (get it here)

SEO Friendly Images is a WordPress optimization plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, this plugin will add them according the options you set. Additionally this makes the post W3C/xHTML valid as well.  Can’t get much better than that, right?

Now, this plugin isn’t going to rocket you to the top of your already competitive keywords on Google.  It just won’t do that and no plugin will single-handedly “do” SEO for you.  You have to continue to post good stuff regularly and work your butt off with your actual photography ( go figure?!?). The best SEO is to do what you do, rinse, and repeat.  However, once all that work is done, you won’t have Google mad at your blog.

4. Faster Image Insert – (get it here)

This plugin is  extremely valuable to photobloggers.  We are always posting tons of pictures and if you are familiar with how WordPress handles inserting images, you know it can be a pain in the butt to have to insert one at a time (WordPress has the ability to multi-upload as well).  This plugin completely does away with that and allows you to insert as many images as you want into a single post at the same time.  When I found this plugin, it almost brought tears to my eyes with the time it saved me.

5. Flickr Photo Album -(get it here)

Yet another beautiful plugin for creating killer photo albums.  This one is for all of you who user your Flickr account regularly and really don’t want to duplicate that process.  I use this plugin for pieces of my portfolio in the About section of this website.

“This Flickr plugin for WordPress will allow you to pull in your Flickr photosets and display them as albums on your WordPress site. There is a pretty simple template provided, but you can customize the templates 100% to match the look and feel of your own site. And if you want, you could also hook it up with Lightbox or any other number of display libraries.”

6. WP Super cache -(get it here)

WP Super Cache’s value can be measured in actual money.  The point of this plugin is to make your site as fast as possible by caching as much of your blog as it can.  Because photographers throw 5x as many images on their blogs as other people, this comes in extremely handy.

How do you measure it’s value in money?  Simple.  Most photobloggers are on shared hosting (BlueHost, Godaddy, etc) and these companies don’t like one website taking up all of their bandwidth and server processing power.  If you don’t want your website to be shut off (literally) and you don’t want to drop some serious coin on a more robust hosting package, this is an excellent little plugin to have in the toolbox.  Money saved.

Another added benefit of WP Super Cache is it’s ability to significantly speed up the load time on your site.  The best way to lose viewership is to make your viewers wait – this plugin solves this problem.  I can’t recommend this plugin enough.

7. Twitter Tools– (get it here)

It almost feels patronizing to have this plugin in this list since most people know about it and use it.  This being said, this plugin has some powerful tools for the photoblogger.  Twitter tools effectively links your blog with your Twitter account.  You can have your WordPress blog updated via Twitter or you can have Twitter updated when you post a blog.  This is an incredibly effective way to save yourself some time and jump headfirst into the social media game.  This is honestly the go-to plugin for anything that has to do with Twitter.

8.  Advanced Category Excluder – (get it here)

ACE is a plugin that allows you to effectively categorize your WordPress blog.  I know, I know – WordPress already has a categories functionality out of the box, however, Advanced Category Excluder adds significantly to your ability to break up content the way you want it, exclude content from a certain page, and much more effectively organize your content on your blog – important for photobloggers who might be using their blog as a portfolio or for those people trying not to confuse their readers.

A word on plugins: Plugins are amazing and can make your photoblogging life so much easier, however, don’t get carried away.  Plugins have the capacity to objectively ruin your blog by making it slower, breaking core functionality, and annoying your visitors.  A good rule of thumb is generally to use as few plugins as possible and only the ones that are useful to your core functionality.  I know, I know, that dancing banana plugin that you just love so much is worth it, right?  The point being, some plugins are so pervasive that the photoblogger has to ask themselves what they are trying to accomplish with said plugin.  Just because you can use cool plugins doesn’t give you a great reason to do so.  Be picky.

Honorable Mention: I stuck to plugins that are directly useful for photobloggers, nonetheless, here is a full list of plugins that I find useful:

What plugins do you find helpful/useful?