8 Of the 15 Different preset theme styles, each of which can be paired with four different gallery or home page styles equals 60 total options.
Why is that whenever one is scouring the internet for a WordPress Photography Theme, that the Photocrati theme always pops up somewhere. I guess about 95% of all collections of WordPress themes for photographers on review blogs has this theme on their list of top pics.
So why should I bother with having it as the first featured theme here at the WordPress Themes For Photographers website? Is it because I feel compelled to do so? Frankly, no – and my legitimate reason is the fact that at the time of writing this, my own photography website runs on the Photocrati theme.
The first thing that had my attention with the Photocrati theme is the built-in eCommerce. Before I first stumbled upon Photocrati a few years ago, I was shifting from one theme to another (in those days there were not so many sexy WordPress Photography themes around), and I was using the WP-eCommerce plugin to sell my prints online.
Now although this plugin has a lot more features as a shopping cart system (such as multiple payment gateways, whereas the Photocrati theme offers only PayPal), I had to add and configure all my images as products, one by one. With Photocrati, you just need to set up the eCommerce system once, add your print (or digital image) sizes, and it is applied to all the images across the board. And I use PayPal anyway, so this is an awesome feature for me.
There are many more great characteristics to the Photocrati theme, some of which are not available on any other WordPress photography theme I have come across, and then there are others which can be achieved with the use of a separate plugin, such as the built-in copyright protection of Photocrati, which can be had with something like CopyRightPro. The inherent capability of Photocrati just makes it easier.
But of all, what I love the most about this theme is the length to which it can be customized. The most noticeable, and which everyone advertises is the fact that it has “60 styles out of the box”, which is completely true, but that is not even the beginning.
One particular feature impresses me quite a bit, and this is something which I have not come across in any other WordPress photography theme (when I do, I will be sure to let you know) – and this is the ability to crop thumbnails according to their aspect ratio, and thereby to create very interesting gallery layouts, and to display your portrait and landscape image thumbnails side by side, without sacrificing half of the image. I am actually going to take the time in illustrating to you what I mean.
Click here to find out a whole lot more on the official Photocrati Theme Website!
In the gallery settings, one of the many options are to control the display of thumbnails. Here is the default setting, and the front end result (This is a mix of portrait and landscape images, as you will soon see):
Here is the result of setting the “Thumbnail Cropping” option to “Off”, so that all the images are displayed in their original aspect ratios:
Here is the result of setting the “Thumbnail Cropping Option” to “Off”, and at the same time clearing the “Height” value, so that the portrait and landscape images are all the same size:
And finally, this is what it looks like when adjusting the whole thumbnail size, by increasing the width value:
Well, I have not even scratched the surface of what this theme is capable of, but I do hope that I have whetted your appetite to go and play around with it a bit. It is such an immensely popular theme, and for good reason. And although so many photographers are using it, you have all the potential to create something very unique with it, given all the customization features.
