Five Free, Really Quite Lovely Photoblog Themes For WordPress

Recently, I’ve been looking to revamp my own photography blog and have been trawling through a number of blog themes to find something well put together. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of WordPress themes for text based blogs, but it still seems to be quite difficult to find a nicely designed Photo blog theme. Here are five themes that I came across that had good functionality and a design that could be used straight out of the box or easily changed to suit your needs.

Zack 990, by designer Andrea Mignola, is an impressive theme and it’s a surprise it’s not a premium theme. It is based on the idea of the Boston Globe’s big picture site and allows you to post pictures up to a maximum size of 990 pixels wide. The footer section features four columns of widget-ready areas, where you can drop in any widget that takes your fancy.

Grace displays a rotating gallery of featured pictures up to 990pixels, with six smaller thumbnails underneath. Stylish and very easy to use, this theme is simple and clean with a small area for widgets on the home page and post page.

Occular Professor is another nice showcase for photographers, also created by Andrea Mignola. Photographs appear on the left with a small nicely laid out area with the photograph details on the right. The typography is well considered and looks very smart on the page.

Reflection by Xyloid uses AJAX to display EXIF data and the photograph description as a temporary overlay on the image. The theme is simple and elegant, displaying one image at a time, and has a simple navigation system on the top left of the page.

The only thing I don’t like about this (and it really is a minor, personal thing) is the reflection underneath the image.

Full screen is another theme which you would expect to be available at a premium, but it is free when you sign up for (free) membership with Graphpaper themes. The homepage features an array of your images with a nice rollover effect. When you click on a thumbnail, a photograph fills one column. It’s also possible to use theme with a combination of photographs with room for a large body of text on the right hand side. Some photographers may find the homepage a little too fussy and prefer to use a simpler layout, but it’s hard not to admire the functionality on this theme. Four columns for widgets sit at the bottom of the page.

WordPress themes for photobloggers are getting better all the time and these are just five of many good themes available. What photoblog themes have impressed you recently?