About the Project

Essential Foto is developed and maintained by Creative Graphic Solutions.BIZ, (Design, Web, and Print) Headquartered in Knoxville Tennessee.

Essential Foto came about because I wanted a simple (and free) photo gallery solution I could quickly set up for my clients, even if they were not using WordPress.

I began looking for a way I could use the WordPress photo gallery for existing websites. However, I had a hard time finding a theme that wasn’t big and clunky with huge headers. Why should someone have to scroll down before they could even see the photo content?

So I started hacking on the default theme, Twenty Thirteen, because it seemed basic and easy to change. I wanted to do as little work as possible to fulfill a need.

However, as I continued development, it turned into a much bigger project. I was working toward a photo gallery solution that anyone might easily use.

And there was a lot of work to do! The default theme I was re-skinning was designed for both mobile and desktop, and I needed to allow for custom menus, different gallery settings, pages, posts, widgets, comments, etc. My stylesheet grew as it seemed there was always one more thing to add.

The project also became a kind of experiment to see how much actual functionality could be changed using CSS. As it turned out, quite a lot! (You can easily drop parts of Essential Foto directly into your custom CSS or child theme.)

After much research, development, and coding I was finally satisfied enough to release the first version of Essential Foto.

Check out the Demo then get the Download!