With a cool and feature packed WordPress photography theme designers, photographers and other creatives can really benefit from showcasing their creative work online.
An unique and special portfolio is great for the exposure of your work and for converting visitors on your website into potential customers! It turns out that WordPress themes for photographers have great potential for supporting creative people to get a quick and cheap online portfolio set up without compromising quality and professionalism.
One of the main reasons, besides WordPress simply being an excellent publishing platform, is the wide supply of high quality WordPress photo themes. Themes in this category and especially modern WordPress portfolio themes have been designed to make it easy to get photographs and other creative work presented online. Further WordPress themes are generally easy to install, configure and extend to specific needs.
For example if a theme is perfect in most ways, but lack capabilities for featuring top content on the front page, you will be able to use WordPress slider plugins to solve this. This article provides a large list of great WordPress themes for photographers. Keep in mind that most professional high quality themes for WordPress with customer support typically is not free. In particular the premium themes often comes with features that makes your life a bit easier and allow you to focus on your business and creative work.
If what you are looking for is a way to sell your work online I recommend you check out some e-commerce themes for WordPress as only few dedicated WordPress photo themes have shopping cart features build in. At the end of this article, I have shared some tips for choosing the right theme. Please drop a comment, share your opinion, experience about this kind of themes, and let us know if we missed one or more great WordPress photography themes.
Disclosure: Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links and I will earn a commission if you purchase through those links (at no extra cost to you). I recommend that you do your own independent research before purchasing any product or service. This article is not a guideline, a recommendation or endorsement of specific products.
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Article Index
Collection of WordPress Photography Themes
Now lets move on. I am sure you will like one or more of the cool WordPress themes for Photographers below.
DeepFocus – Photography Website Template – MORE INFO / DEMO
DeepFocus is one of my favourite photography themes as it takes a business like approach to showing off photos with style. The theme is clean and use simple graphics but allows you to go creative with nice looking backgrounds. There are plenty of options and features available for setting up a unique and outstanding photography website without any coding!
Photocrati – WordPress Photography Website Framework – MORE INFO / DEMO
Photocrati is a website buider framework for photograpther and it is using the worlds most popular CMS as platform. This WordPress theme is trusted by more than 17000 photographers so far. It is different than most other themes in this category because it is not just a one off design. Iit features 15 different styles and four home page layouts to allow you to have the flexibility you need all without any need for coding. The theme comes with built-in e-commerce image galleries. This is a great feature if you would like to sell your work online!
Invictus – MORE INFO / DEMO
This is a very hot WordPress theme for building a photogrpahy gallery or portfolio website. The design makes use of a fullscreen background to show off specific photos. Invictus would very well be a good choice whether you are a photographer, digital artist, designer or even a private person, who want to present your images in a unique way.
Glare – MORE INFO / DEMO
Glare is a cool full screen photography theme for WordPress. It is fully responsive and perfect for photographers who would want to showcase their work in an online portfolio. Glare has two types of homepages, one with super photo slider and the other with full screen background video! It has a lot of features to offer so this theme is really worth checking out!
Keres Fullscreen Photography Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
Keres is the responsive WordPress theme built for photography, portfolio website. It Comes with many cool features such as fullscreen slideshow, Ken Burns slideshow, unique image flow gallery, skin manager, fullscreen contact map, fullscreen Youtube and Vimeo video, customizable elements color, font and background image. There is also more than 50 advanced shortcodes with shortcode generator support.
Source – Responsive Photography WordPress Theme – MORE INFO | DEMO
Source is a responsive theme perfect for photographers that want to present their images with style online. It is responsive and therefore fully compatible with mobile devices and it contains many options that will make it easy to customize to fit your needs. Source theme includes shortcodes plugin with 17 button tinymce and very flexible admin theme options.
Photogra Fullscreen Responsive WP Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
PhotoGra is a cool responsive fullscreen WordPress theme made for photographers, creative agencies or any kind of bushiness to show off works in an online portfolio. Due to the responsive design it is compatible with almost all device (desktop, tablet, mobile). PhotoGra is equipped with a powerful custom panel for ease in managing the contents. This theme also coming with enhanced jquery effects.
Dano Multi-purpose & Responsive WordPress Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
Dano is a minimalistic multi-purpose theme with responsive design meaning it serves many different website types. It is in particluar good for photography heavy portfolios and makes a good presentation of images. It is easy to customize the homepage layout. as this theme has a Home Page section builder and a Drag and drop layout manager.
Evolution – Minimalistic Responsive Photo Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
Evolution a fully responsive and higly minimalistic theme with great ability to display photography. Evolution come with four distinct layouts, each meant to improve your user’s experience when browsing on mobile phones and tablets. Using the Elegant page builder makes it one of the most flexible themes for setting up a website with custom page layouts.
Vernissage Responsive Photography Portfolio Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
Vernissage is a powerful and modern responsive portfolio and photography WordPress Theme built with cool features: Fullscreen slider (3 types), Skin manager, Unlimited colors, Flexible layout, Easy gallery management and more.
Fashion9 – Responsive Photography WordPress Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
Fashion9 is a responsive theme perfect for photographers .It is fully compatible with mobile devices and it contains many options that will make it easy to customize and fit your needs. Fashion9 includes 52 built-in shortcodes, 19 button shorcodes and very flexible admin theme options.
Sniper Premium Photography Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
Sniper is a Powerful Premium Responsive + Liquid WordPress Theme built for Photographers, Creative Agencies or Portfolio website. All elements of our Theme are liquid so it sucsesfully adapts to any device from Desktop to Mobile. We also took into account that not all users has html/css experience so that knowledge is not necessary.
Tripod Professional WordPress Photography Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
Tripod is a professional WordPress Photography theme With features like Drag and drop Layout Builder, Unlimited Custom Templates, Eye Candy animation effects, Built in Like System, Facebook Commenting, Background Colors and images, Retina Ready and responsive design and with 13+ widgets and 100+ Shortcodes.
PhotoPro – Photography WordPress Theme – MORE INFO | DEMO
With PhotoPro you get exactly what it sounds like…a professionally developed WordPress theme for photographers. The theme’s main focus is providing you with a great canvas for showcasing your creative work. The minimal design, combined with some great jQuery effects and unique layouts are sure to make your site stand out from the crowd and captivate your visitors attention.
Smartscreen Fullscreen Responsive WordPress Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
Smartscreen is a clean, resposive design WordPress theme with unlimited colors, lots of lots of shortcoeds, unlimited sidebar, powerful admin panel and localization support.
Valerie – Photography WordPress Theme – MORE INFO | DEMO
Valerie is a full ajax site with a unique design. It’s a minimal yet powerful wordpress theme. It contains two preset skins, dark and light and also unlimited other color options for every element. Valerie is a perfect theme for photographers or other artist to showcase their work in a professional way. It has a compatible layout with mobile devices. We have tested it in all major browsers in desktop and mobile devices. Compatible on latest WordPress version 3.5
JPhotolio Responsive Wedding photography WP Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
JPhotolio is premium responsive WordPress themes for Wedding Photographer. This themes provide everything that you need to “WOW” your visitor with your photo, video, or even music. JPhotolio let you have unlimited size of portfolio with unlimited probability of style & color schema Not only that, it’s also provide very easy way your visitor get in touch with you. From Integration with Google Direction, Ajax Contact form with Professional Email notification, and also we integrated Google SMTP.
Fluxus Portfolio Theme for Photographers – MORE INFO / DEMO
Fluxus is a magazine inspired WordPress theme. It features a portfolio horizontal layout, which allows you to showcase your work side by side. Just like we are used to see it in print. It focuses on big images, minimal design, beautiful typography, so that your art is free to stand out.
Depth Fullscreen Ajax Portfolio WordPress Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
It is a perfect foundation for Creative Portfolio or Personal site with Blog, Portfolio, Galleries, etc. If you want to impress your visitors with an awesome unique and fresh-looking site this template is exactly right for you!
One Page Parallax Responsive WordPress Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
Ego is a sleek, fully responsive, one page WordPress theme that screams with attitude. It boasts a fullscreen slider with custom captions, an AJAX portfolio and contact form, a blog and tons of styling options. Its the perfect WordPress theme for the freelancer or small design studio that wants to showcase their work in style.
Agera Responsive Fullscreen Photo WP Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
Agera is a beautiful full width photo grid theme for WordPress. This theme let photographers and designers showcase their work the smart way online.
BEAT – Full Screen Responsive Photography Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
Beat is a theme for photographers and other creative people. It incluides full screen, boxed and wide layouts. Packed with features this theme is ideal for graphic designers, photographers, media agencies, artists, directors, video editors and web design companies to impress their potential clients by presenting an impressive portfolio.
Franklyn Portfolio Blog WordPress Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
Franklyn is a responsive, multi purpose premium WordPress theme. Franklyn is ideal for a range of applications, from standard blogs to creative portfolios. Franklyn avoids falling into the trap of feature bloat and inflexibility that many other themes suffer from.
HQ Photography Responsive WP Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
Looking for something unique and awesome, this template is what you need. We’re proud to present a super interactive and engaging template well-suited for photographers and videographers, which won’t leave any visitor indifferent to and forgetful about experience they had with your website. A whole set of features is exposed to dynamic manipulation in real time by a visitor such as home page visuals, video background, photo/video grid gallery, portfolio layout and much more.
Photojax Minimalist AJAX Photography Portfoli0 – MORE INFO | DEMO
Photojax is a clean and minial, yet unique, WordPress photography theme. This sleek and modern theme features two color skins, beautiful galleries using the premium Royal Slider plugin ($20 value), an audio player, and a minimal blog (all you’ll need for a great photography portfolio). Although designed for photographers it can be a great theme for graphic designers, architects, and anyone else with an image based portfolio.
360°complete – Responsive WordPress Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
360Complete uses the WordPress Customizer to handle all of your theme-options. It has a lot of useful features like the shortcode generator, prettyPhoto lightbox, carousel slider, flex / layer sliders, filterable portfolio, ajax contact form & much more.
Pacifico – Fullscreen wp theme with motion effect – MORE INFO / DEMO
Pacifico is a fullscreen background WordPress theme which need to be checked out! Enjoy the beautiful pictures in motion with the incomparable Motion Slider. Cool for showcasing photos online
Responsive Fullscreen Studio for WordPress – MORE INFO / DEMO
RSW ( Responsive Fullscreen Studio for WordPress ) is a powerful theme for photographers and creative artists and comes with Light and Dark with theme options supporting multicolor customization of theme elements using color pickers. Creative artists can easily display their products using unlimited portfolio and post formats supporting Aside, Quote, Audio, Video, Link, Image and Gallery. The fonts can be changed using 400+ Google Web fonts choices in theme options.
Fashion – Premium Responsive Photography Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
Responsive full screen photography themes, jQuery and custom JavaScript Powered, Portfolio and Blog template included.
Gleam WordPress Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
Gleam was built to dazzle. With its flashy effects and smooth ajax loading techniques, this theme creates a truly unique experience that is sure to grab your visitor’s attention. Allowing for custom full BG photos for each page, Gleam makes it easy to create a custom stunning appearance for each section of your website. The theme also comes with a full-screen portfolio section, giving you a new way to display your work.
MAGNIFICAT Photography Responsive WordPress Theme – MORE INFO | DEMO
MAGNIFICAT – a boxed WordPress theme with a great Grid portfolio style to show off photography.
Mater – Fullscreen Image & Video Background WP – MORE INFO | DEMO
Mater is a great way to make fullscreen image and video background websites with an elegant design. The theme is hghly customizable, you can choose unlimited color schemes and many Content Stacker Items.
Architectos – Blog & Photo WordPress Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
Architectos is perfect for architecture or design orientated blogs or for creative people/agencies who’s tired of regular thumbnails grids layouts. Features full screen background slideshow, home sliders, masonry layout and video support. As a FREE Bonus you’ll get the award winning Visual Composer plugin integrated into the theme, which lets you to create complex layouts with simple drag-n-drop interface.
ANAN – For Photography Creative Portfolio – MORE INFO / DEMO
ANAN is a premium portfolio, personal, photography website Templates built with latest WordPress features. Custom Post Type, Unlimited Colors and Image Uploader etc.
This Way WP Full Video/Image Background with Audio – MORE INFO / DEMO
This Way Word Press Theme is designed with HTML5 & CSS3. It features full Screen Image & Full Screen Video Background with Audio support. It also has an awesome JQuery animated effect, Twitter feeds and social media links. It is easy customize blog and portfolio with filter.
Viewfinder – Photography wordpress theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
Viewfinder is a photography theme which provides the perfect showcase for your art. There are no gimmicks, nothing that will fall out out fashion, just a timeless design that focuses user’s attention on you and your talent – this is how it should be. Coming in two different flavours, light or dark, and with the ability to add an unlimited number of galleries, there’s plenty of scope to set this up just the way you want it.
Village – MORE INFO / DEMO
If you love photography or general creativeness and want new interesting ways to display your work then this could be the theme for you. They have WordPress video tutorials that can guide you through how to create everything you need. The theme also has helpful hints throughout to let you know what everything does. If you want to create a unique look you will like that they have included many different modules that are unique to Themeforest, like the interactive query wall, and the floating slideshow navigation with automatic scroll.
Slash WP – MORE INFO / DEMO
Slash WP is a new Premium WordPress Theme with a unique modern design – perfect for showcasing your work. It is one of the WordPress photography themes that works great for portfolios, photo-gallery or blog. It’s very powerful with native support for WP 3.2 post formats and it’s also made to look good on iPhone and iPad or other mobile devices. It comes with 3 homepage templates allowing a full-width slideshow, static homepage or a full-width video homepage.
CORE – Minimalist Photography Portfolio – MORE INFO / DEMO
Core is the Minimalist Photography, Portfolio, Personal website Template built with latest WordPress features. It has lot’s of features like Custom Post Type and Image Uploader, tons of shortcodes etc.
Studio Zen Fullscreen Photo WordPress Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
Studio Zen is yet another new, powerful and beautiful theme with a clean design for photo enthusiasts and creative artists to show their work. It features full screen slideshows utilizing the entire browser area and making your photos the center of attention. The main theme can be either light or dark. It features a full screen slideshow with captions and audio and many awesome transition effects. Full screen video playback from vimeo, flash, youtube or html 5 videos. You can have an unlimited amount of portfolios with loads of different ways to customize and setup your personal look and feel.
Shutter – Photography & Portfolio WordPress theme – MORE INFO / DEMO
Shutter is an elegant and flexible portfolio theme for photographers, artists and design studios. Pick a background, make it a full screen slideshow, combine it with videos, and enjoy having complete control over colors and fonts (you can choose from over 300). You can really rock up your theme, by using custom pictures and videos all in an integrated fashion that’sas easy as it gets. Shutter was born to be flexible: several different templates to choose from, one big fancy customizable slideshow component and the ability to create multiple sidebars. Combine this with WordPress standards features, being fully translatable, and allowing for child themes creation, and you get the ultimate theme, clean, fresh yet professional and suitable for multiple uses.
Right Now WP Full Video, Image with Audio – MORE INFO / DEMO
Right Now is an awesome and elegant theme perfect for creative artist, designers and photographers. It features an enhanced HTML5 and CSS3 standard with an Ajax load function. You can draw the screen and easily navigate the screen. It’s optimized for iPhone, iPad and android and supports youtube, vimeo, flv, mp4 and mov. Furthermore there are animated buttons with sfx, deeplink support
“Full Fashion” – an Ajax Fullscreen WP Theme – MORE INFO | DEMO
The web-site is created using ajax, in this way every page is loaded without refreshing the browser.
The template has a nice transition when chaning paging which will make your web-site a lot more different than the majority of existing templates.
Duotive Fortune – MORE INFO / DEMO
The new Duotive Frontpage Manager allows you to set up your home page the way you need it. Create multiple front pages that can be easily interchanged with a few clicks. Save settings for different types and store them in your database. Using an intuitive graphical user interface rearranging the front page modules is a piece of cake! Populate your front page with dynamic content using the portfolio and blog modules. Duotive Fortune comes with a vast number of styles and shortcodes that can be used to organize and give importance to your information in the right order. Make use of the multiple columns combinations available to get most out of your content and connect to you audience. Tables, lists, quotes, many buttons with and without icons, mp3 and video player are just a few of the possibilities that the theme tries to offer.
Tips and guidance for choosing a photography WordPress theme
- Fresh baked is best: I recommend that you choose a photography theme that have been recently updated e.g. within 2-4 months. Also make sure the vendor or developer provide support and that both the theme and the vendor have a good “reputation”. You can look through comments and if you are lucky there are ratings from other users.
- Design and layout considerations: There are many ways you can choose to showcase your work using an online photo gallery. Some will benefit from using full screen photography themes where the photos are used a background. This is cool for photographers as the large format allow for great details to show off. It also work well for people that create videos as some full screen WordPress themes support video. Others may need gallery or grid page templates to create great looking line-ups of work artifacts, client case studies etc.
- Theme options: If you are not a CSS expert and like diving into the code layer this part is important. Investigate how flexible the theme is and what your customization needs are. Some themes have a massive set of options build in for e.g. changing color, fonts, sidebars, footers, headers etc. This is the easiest way to make a standard theme stand out a bit! Some themes also come with several color schemes and this may be useful in the design phase.
- Check for the needed technical features: If you are a photographer you may want to sell your work online or give clients access to a private area. Some themes support this but it is also possible to add these features using shopping cart plugins or WordPress membership plugins.
- Integration to external resources: Often creative material is already made available on sites e.g. photo streams on Flickr. If you need this it is a good idea to review the widgets and shortcodes available as part of the theme. Also integration of social media sites must be consider important on most sites today. This kind of integration can be done using e.g. WordPress Facebook plugins but often it is simpler and fits better into the overall design if natively part of the theme.
- User interaction and call to action: Make sure you have a clear understanding of how visitors contact you and how you convince as many as possible to do so. Content is king for sure and if your material is awesome most people will find a way. However photo themes with page templates, shortcodes etc. that makes it simple to insert contact forms and signup forms can make help you out here.
Lars is passionate about web design, web development, SEO, social media and loves to look into new technologies, techniques, tools etc. and to write articles for tripwire magazine readers.
I like Evolution theme so much. I found so many interesting stuff about my interest. Thanks
Great collection of templates here. I’m looking to build a website for another photography business and saw many options here. Thanks!
Great collection of templates here. I’m looking to build a website for another photography business and saw many options here. Thanks!
Glad you liked the collection 🙂
I like atlas theme but is it mobile compatible?
best collection ever . .
wow it is a amazing site i m soo happy with this thanks a lot
Thank you 🙂
thanks very much. found here my new theme for my photography site. thanks for that
Very nice post, these themes are really good. I just love them
thx Lars Vraa for sharing this wonder ful themes. I will be using one of them in my photography blog
Haven’t you heard about oQey Themes? They have themes for photography too. Also, they create different skins for photo galleries. I use their themes because these have great video and photo WordPress plugins. The themes are original and easy to use. Also, I like them because these are modern and include a lot of features.
Awesome collection 🙂
I all the time used to study article in news papers but now
as I am a user of web so from now I am using net
for articles or reviews, thanks to web.
We’re a group of volunteers and starting a new scheme in our community. Your site provided us with valuable information to work on. You’ve performed an impressive job and our entire community will likely be thankful to you.
Thanks , I have recently been searching for information about this subject for ages and yours is the best I have
found out till now. However, what about
the bottom line? Are you sure concerning the
supply?
These are truly fantastic ideas in about blogging. You have touched some good factors here.
Any way keep up wrinting.
Not surprising that most of these amazing themes are available on themeforest . Themeforest always handpicks premium designs from top developers. I’ve never had any problems with any of the developers there
What a fantastic summary, thank you.
Anyone help?
My question is I am moving from a travel blog to more of a photo blog.
I need 3 things –
Great image display of portfolios, videos and individual photos
Equally good blog display of text and images /videos within with sideshow etc IN the blog post
Wow factor on the homepage…
What do I suggest?
Of the whole 75 I viewed, the closest were:
Photocrati
Pacifico
Shutter
Striking
Atlas
Studio Box
And my slight favourite, Slash
Please let me know what you think.
Thanks
Eddie M.
Awesome Collection of nice photography themes…. This list would help us a lot… Thanks for the effort !!!!!
Regards
J…
whats the name of this Theme? Sarah Mundzek – High quality photography
By looking into the code I’m pretty sure it is the
Mansion theme
from graphpaperpress
Nice – thanks for the list, I’m trying to pin down a good photo theme and now I’ve got plenty to check into. I’m hoping to find a good responsive design if possible, and see that there’s some here.
I wish I had seen this blog over a year ago and before I spent ages designing my site! I am switching to wordpress as it is so much easier to update and add extra pages without all the coding and coding errors! And at $40 for a website theme, you really cant go wrong.
Your taste in styles is obviously subjective; fortunately they are mostly my style too! i am now selecting very similar looking sites which makes it even more difficult!
Many thanks for the blog!
Rich, thanks for sharing your view on this and I really hope you find what you are looking for. I’m a WordPress fan myself and I’m confident moving to this platform will work for you long term!
they are realy nice.
what is the name of this theme: http://sarah-mundzek.de
By looking into the code I’m pretty sure it is the Mansion theme from graphpaperpress
Really Awesome And Good Looking Professional Themes..
Great and awesome collection 🙂 I really love those themes from Elegant Themes, they are very attractive and the price is killer.
Really Professinal themes, i have tried Auzora it have a very professsional look !
thanks for this post, its really help me to design any professional wedding photography site. thanks again.
King Size full screen theme is best, I really like , it solve my problem for my photography clients…. thnxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Thanks for the list! +1
Great themes and good article!
Though, when looking at the future and especially at mobile devices and touch screens, I am missing a HTML5 swipe function to scroll through images and portfolios.
Another point is the fact, that menues that are folding out on OnMouseOver are useless, they no OnFingerOver command 😉
Has anyone thought about these points or more and related informations?
Thanks
Felix
I didn’t realize WordPress had all of this available to photographers. I’ll have to check it out when I start working on my photo blog. Thank you for sharing.
thanks for useful photography wordpress themes
Stunning Resources! Great roundup!!! I am extremely inspired with the list here, looks awesome and professional. Thanks for sharing
Thanks for this great post. It helped me a lot.
@You should make a list of only free photoblog themes as well.
+1
You should make a list of only free photoblog themes aswell.
Stumbled across this on my search for a decent wp theme for a professional photographer. I´m surprised to see that even some premium themes have buggy nav menus and javascript transitions. I’ll mention no names 🙂 –
Thanks for the list!
Good post – useful. Now which to pick…
🙂
really v good themes
i will try this themes in my wordpress
Finally, an article that makes sense! As a photographer in special events, in the San Francisco bay area, I can apply some of this in my business model. Thank you!
Hey, great article! As a photographer in weddings, in the San Francisco bay area, I can apply some of this in my business model. Thank you!
I get tonnes of requests to build photography websites and this list has given me a great resource of WordPress themes to pull from. Thanks!
really useful and professional themes you sharing. thanks
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