Photonic WordPress Plugin is used as a gallery plugin to display images or albums from Flickr, Smugmug, Google Photos, 500px, Instagram, Zenfolio etc.
If you are a professional photograher who is already active in Flickr, Smugmug or 500px, then this plugin is of importance to you as you could display your already existing photos without uploading to your wordpress platform.
Pros of Photonic WordPress Plugin
1. Free – Its one of the best gallery plugin and its free. Its even better than some of the paid plugins out there. So just for this you could give a 5 star.
2. Good Support from Plugin Author – The plugin author Sayontan Sinha is very active in wordpress support forums to resolve the issues. He is also active on Github where all his themes and plugins are available for everyone in opensource.
3. Very Feature Rich – It supports Guttenberg and its one of the most feature rich gallery plugins around.
4. Supports commonly used lightbox scripts like Colorbox, Fancybox, Featherlight etc.
5. Necessary for a shared or small hosting environment. Instead of hosting in your webserver space, you can host all your photos in a free photo hosting sites like flickr or 500px – thereby saving space and bandwidth on your server, which you can install using the ServerMania Los Angeles Data Center services online.
Cons of Photonic WordPress Plugin
1. Can be a bit difficult to configure and use for novices. But once you get to know the plugin, its the best.. the documnetation is there in the plugin website in detail.
I can’t think of any other issues with the plugin..
My final Thoughts on Photonic WordPress Plugin
A super free plugin with almost all the features you need for a wordpress gallery.
I am rating this plugin with a 5 star because its free, powerful, useful and pretty much needed for a professional photographer who uses his Flickr or 500px account and also have a WordPress site on the side.
I am not taking one star off for the configuration difficulty since the documentation is present in detail by the author. I am personally using this plugin and loving it.
Since Flickr has changed their terms (only 1000 pics allowed for free users, you might also want to check out my review about Cloudinary for hosting your images. There are other plugins available for cloudinary. I am not sure if Photonic will extend support for Cloudinary.