When I started photo blogging, I settled for a blogging platform called PixelPost. It served me well for a long time, but at a certain point I started to want more flexibility in the design of the blog. PixelPost does not offer the variety of themes that WordPress does, and as many others was starting to use WordPress as a platform for photo blogging – and I knew WordPress from other blogs I maintained – I made the bold move of changing platforms.

However, with greater freedom comes the need for clearer decisions. As it turns out, choosing a theme from all available is not an easy task. Not at all. There are a number of different ways to display a photo on a screen, and a variety of colors and shapes to surround it. I have tried quite a few photo blogging themes on this blog in the few weeks since I started to use WordPress, and have finally settled for something I will stick with (at least for now…). But still, I haven’t found a theme that gives me everything that I want (the Aperture theme I’m using now is great in many ways, but the background of the photos is white, and that is less that optimal, in my view, and the image resizing engine is less than optimal), so the thing is to decide on the most important feature you want, and then go for something that provides that.

Anyway, given that I have had some experience with different photo blogging themes in the past weeks, I thought I’d share some thoughts here.

Greyfoto Grayfoto is a German production and is by far the nicest free theme I have come across for WordPress. The documentation, however, was a little hard to make sense of, given most of it was written in German, and what was written in English was not sufficient to get the theme up and running for me. Too bad, actually, because I really would have liked to see this theme in action. See bueltge.de/photos for a preview.

Phloggin Looked like an OK theme, but I got a fatal error when activating it. I investigated it a little, but gave up a little to easily here, perhaps.

Autofocus Great and elegant theme, but for some reasons I didn’t get it to work like I wanted. Some tweaking of the code are necessary to make it take the final step. Check out Mike Bakers photo blog for a an example of how well this theme can look.

Reflection A nice theme in the preview, but hard to get working like it was supposed to.

Photoland A very nice theme from WPZoom that I used for some time. It resembles the way my old PixelPost displayed photos, and that was my reason for buying it. But as a wanted to show more of my photos on the front page, I started to look for something else.

So, there you go, it you have any experience with photo blogging themes that you want to share, feel free to do so in the comment field!