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I am currently using the standard Wordpress gallery which I like because a lot of my visitors find me through Google after searching some text which is included in the image description. It obviously renders the gallery in such a way that the text is seen as quite prominent and a lot of my visitors enter through the gallery.

The problem is that the gallery only enables portrait orientation, whereas I need something that shows the images in landscape as well (to avoid the cropping at the edges).

I find that some galleries that allow both orientations struggle to place the images on the screen in such a way that they look good together. The best example of what I like is Flickr where the images are shown in a kind of tetris layout but obviously doesn't allow comments underneath them.

I am perfectly capable of hunting through the wordpress plugins for a nice looking gallery, but I am worried that I won't get something that is as good for SEO as my current gallery. Does anyone have any suggestions of how I can achieve this?

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  • Plugin recommendations are off topic, can you be more precise about what you're asking? My own website uses the standard WordPress gallery and my gallery thumbnails are all squares, perhaps you mean to say your theme shows all photos in portrait, or all your photos are taller than they are wide, if you could clarify? Is it just the visual styling of your gallery thumbnails?
    – Tom J Nowell ♦
    Dec 10, 2014 at 12:41
  • @TomJNowell I don't remember asking for a plugin recommendation but I am looking for a way to show images without cropping or stretching. As you know pictures aren't taken in square sizes, they're either portrait or landscape so to make it into a square require some of it to be chopped off. I need to show images without any of this. I don't care if it's something I have to do myself, the images just need to be proportionate and SEO friendly. I have tried galleries in the plugin section and got nowehre with them.
    – connersz
    Dec 10, 2014 at 12:57
  • Interesting, can you link to any evidence that the proportions of images have any bearing on search ranking? I was unaware of this
    – Tom J Nowell ♦
    Dec 10, 2014 at 12:58
  • @TomJNowell Apologies but I think you're having difficulties understanding. Lets pretend that I don't know about plugins. I need to show images with descriptions on a page without cropping them. The descriptions must be SEO friend as well as the images. I am a photographer, so as you can images, stretching and cropping of images that sell my services is less than ideal and that's what happens with the WP gallery.
    – connersz
    Dec 10, 2014 at 13:01
  • So the SEO thing is pretty much a distraction? You should edit your question to just say you want the gallery images to show in their original aspect ratios
    – Tom J Nowell ♦
    Dec 10, 2014 at 13:10

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I believe your issue is that you've checked this box in the media settings:

enter image description here

Every image uploaded afterwards had it's thumbnail cropped to fit those proportions. Unchecking the box will fix this for new uploaded images but your existing photos will still be cropped.

You can however regenerate the image thumbnails using the new settings. To do so you can use a plugin such as regen thumbnails. There are a few plugins that will do this, but they all do the job. Activate and regenerate your images and they should be proportional. The process may take a little time depending on the size and number of photos you've uploaded, but it only needs to be done once. Deactivate the regeneration plugin once you've finished

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  • I have actually done that before and it worked but the regenerate caused the images to become blurry and pixelated. I don't know why but it didn't look good on a photography website where the images need to look sharp and in focus.
    – connersz
    Dec 10, 2014 at 16:41
  • That could be the plugin you used and how it worked, you'd have to discuss it with the developer, or use a rival plugin, which is out of scope
    – Tom J Nowell ♦
    Dec 10, 2014 at 16:57

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