There is a constant demand for cool themes for photographer portfolios. Unlike business sites or blogs, a visual-heavy website should be user-friendly but also express a state of mind or feeling. While the user-friendliness of a website relies on the rules of good design, expressing a feeling is a different story. It’s more complicated and hard to achieve.
Fortunately, photographers have myriads of themes to choose from—free or premium, niche or multipurpose, simple or complex. New themes with impressive layouts are always welcome. We know that time is irreversible and you can’t afford to spend time searching for the best themes for photographer portfolios. So we did it for you, with a nice mix of well-known and freshly launched themes. Here are our findings!
Photography WordPress
A quite inspired name, 15,000+ sales, and a 4.59 out 5 stars rating on ThemeForest create a very good first impression. This theme has all the features needed for a photography-based website. It works for portfolios, traveling blogs, creative agencies, online CVs, and nonprofits. The dozens of demos and templates illuminate the theme’s potential. Luckily, you can import your favorite demo with just a click and customize it to match your style.
The theme has a built-in visual editor that gives unlimited building options to users. It’s worth mentioning that the theme comes with a few useful features for photographers:
- Client proofing
- Password-protection of images and galleries of images
- Progressive image loading
- Infinite scroll
- Bulk image uploader
- Adobe Lightroom synchronization
- Unlimited photo gallery pages.
PhotoMe
Like the previous theme, PhotoMe is one of the bestsellers from ThemeForest. It was released in 2015, but its developers have made constant improvements. It includes dozens of demos to prove its versatility. PhotoMe is suitable for photographers, but also for projects like creative agencies, personal blogs, and real estate projects. It delights its users with the large palette of options for displaying images. Use sliders, CSS animation effects, and galleries to display your photos. You can even integrate streams of your social media profiles from Instagram, Facebook, or Pinterest.
Zuko
Zuko is a great choice if you prefer a theme more suited to a modern website. It’s part of the latest generation of WordPress themes. It’s optimized for speed and is fully responsive. Responsiveness is hard to achieve for visual-heavy websites. Zuko is bundled with a few famous plugins like Contact 7, Elementor, WooCommerce, and Aheto.
The biggest advantage of Zuko is the unlimited customization options. Zuko isn’t the only fully customizable theme, but it mixes the endless set of options with the simplicity of use. Thanks to Zuko, you can create the photography site of your dreams even if you don’t know how to code.
Kleanity
Kleanity is a minimalist theme that helps people fully focus on the photos showcased. It’s simple, and discrete, but packages an impressively high number of useful features. 14 blog layouts, 9 portfolio types, 6 gallery variants, 19 header styles, and 8 post formats speak volumes about what you can achieve with Kleanity. The theme is WooCommerce compatible, so you can use it for selling your best shoots.
Wiso
Wiso is a theme that expresses elegance from each of its pixels. Use it to showcase dramatic photos or elegant products. Wiso is WooCommerce compatible, so it fits both photographer portfolios and online stores. The theme sails with 30+ demos and 140 shortcodes, so you have enough options to build a standing apart online presence. A unique Wiso feature is the multitude of album designs. Metro, parallax, 4-column masonry, grid, vertical or full slider are a few styles to delight the customers.
Arven – Photography
Arven is a hidden gem on the ThemeForest marketplace. It has a relatively small number of downloads, but an excellent 4.93 out of 5 stars rating. Arven is fast loading, taking only 1.3 seconds to load on a default WordPress install. Despite that, it’s bundled with many useful features. It comes with light and dark skins, header and footer customizer, 45+ different homepages, and 150+ pre-built pages. All these features are enough to create a staggering photographer portfolio.
Whizz
Whizz is another underrated theme on ThemeForest that comes with so many great options. It caters to photographer portfolios, but Whizz works great for every type of project that includes many images. The demos show the theme’s potential and bundle all the pages required by a functional website. Some demos feature image galleries directly on the homepage, which suit portfolios or creative agencies. Others have a more conventional approach by using a full-screen image or a tile masonry layout, which works for online stores, weddings, real estate, and nonprofit websites.
Harmini
Harmini isn’t a minimalist theme, but it’s built on the idea of simplicity and discretion. This theme lets the viewers focus on the images showcased. The white background, the black and white color scheme, the readable and simple fonts, and the richness of negative space are features that differentiate this theme from its competitors.
The theme has an impressive set of customization options, so you can easily choose a demo and style it to meet your requirements.
Delane
Delane is another theme that targets simplicity lovers. This theme expresses calm and elegance, so consider it for projects in line with this approach.
It has two styles, dark and light, with a few demos for each. In addition to the features and customization options, the theme is speed optimized and fully responsive. Therefore, Delane has everything you need to create an expressive theme showcasing cool images.
Rife
Rife, our good-looking theme, is a great choice for photographer portfolios. The most convincing argument is the 25+ demos for photo-based websites. Rife’s versatility is another solid advantage—it’s perfect for both minimalist and content-rich sites. Use Rife for a simple website to showcase your photos, but also for travel blogging/vlogging to present cool destinations. The customization options are another massive advantage of Rife. It includes not only sidebar, header, and footer variants, but also adjustable animation effects. Simply, Rife is discrete and lets people admire your best shots. Altogether, Rife has enough solutions to ensure a superior user experience.
Over to You
After reviewing dozens of themes, we chose these themes for photographer portfolios. Of course, we missed many other cool alternatives. Did we miss your favorite? Leave a comment with the name of your favorite theme for photographer portfolios. We will evaluate it and update the post with your suggestion.