by John West 4.9 (8 reviews)

Slideshow SE

Name: Slideshow SE
Rating: 4.9 (8 reviews)
Author: John West

Completely free, open source plugin to easily add slideshows to your WordPress site.

Slideshow SE ranks #4,909 among WordPress.org plugins with 2,000+ active installations, is #542 of 6,009 in the Media category, a 4.9/5 rating from 8 reviews, and was last updated May 22, 2026. Data from WordPress.org, refreshed twice daily — see methodology.

Compatible with WP 7.0.2

v2.7.1 Current Version v2.7.1

Updated 2 months ago Last Update on 22 May, 2026

Refreshed 8 hours ago Last Refreshed on

#542 of 6,009 in Media Top 10% by installs Downloads -13.3% this week

View on WordPress.org

Rank

#4,909

— No change

Active Installs

2K+

-28.5%

KW Avg Position

129.3

0.3 worse

Downloads

33.4K

+12 today

Support Resolved

— No change

Rating

98%

Review 4.9 out of 5

4.9 (8 reviews)

Next Milestone 3K

Total Progress 83.7%

2K+ 3K+

640

Ranks to Climb

Growth Needed

8,000,000

Active Installs

Pro

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Need 163 more installs to reach 3K+

Rank Changes

Current #4,909

Change

Best #

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Active Installs Growth

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Active Installs 0,000,000+

Growth +0.0%

Peak 0,000,000

Downloads Growth

Downloads

Growth

Peak

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Reviews & Ratings

4.9

8 reviews

Overall 98%

7 (88%)

1 (13%)

0 (0%)

Tracked Keywords

Showing 3 of 3

Keyword	Position	Change	Type	Updated
slideshow	8	—	Tag	1 day ago
Free	188	—	Tag	1 day ago
carousel	192	—	Tag	1 day ago

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Security History

Source: WPVulnerability

4 known vulnerabilities on record · 0 in the last 24 months · checked 1 day ago

Jun 19, 2024

Slideshow SE [slideshow-se] < 2.5.18

CVE-2024-35778 · Fixed in v2.5.18
Jun 18, 2024

Slideshow SE [slideshow-se] < 2.6.0

CVE-2024-35769 · Fixed in v2.6.0
Oct 28, 2022

Slideshow SE [slideshow-se] < 2.5.6

CVE-2022-43461 · Fixed in v2.5.6
Oct 28, 2022

Slideshow SE [slideshow-se] < 2.5.6

CVE-2022-41554 · Fixed in v2.5.6

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Plugin Details

Version: 2.7.1
Last Updated: May 22, 2026
Requires WP: 6.3+
Tested Up To: 7.0.2
PHP Version: 5.0 or higher
Author: John West

Support & Rating

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 4.9
Reviews: 8
Support Threads: 0
Resolved: 0%

Keywords

carousel Free gallery image slideshow

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TL;DR

AI summary of the plugin's readme

This plugin is for WordPress site owners who want to add slideshows to their site without paying for a plugin. It solves the need for a flexible, customizable slideshow tool by letting users create multiple slideshows with images, text, and video slides using existing media library uploads.

Gutenberg block
Multiple slideshows with multiple slides
Image slides
Text slides
YouTube video slides
Responsive design
Multiple slideshows per page
Customizable stylesheets

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about Slideshow SE

Click the 'Image slide' button in the 'Slides List' of the slideshow. A screen will pop up where you'll be able to search though all images that have already been uploaded to your WordPress website. If you want to add new images to the slideshow, or you do not have any images yet, you'll have to upload them to the WordPress media page first.

Just like the posts and pages you're already familiar with, slideshows can be edited. Go to the 'Slideshows' tab in your WordPress admin, and you'll see a list of slideshows. If you have not created a slideshow yet, you can do so by clicking 'Add new' on that same page. If there are slideshows in the list, click on the title of the slideshow you want to change the settings of. On the slideshow's edit page you'll be able to find a box titled 'Slideshow Settings', in this box you can change the slideshow's settings. If you're creating multiple slideshows that should have the same settings, but their settings need to be different from the default settings, you can change the default settings by going to the 'General Settings' page and clicking on the 'Default Slideshow Settings' tab. Newly created slideshows will start off with the settings you set there.

On your WordPress admin page, go to the 'Slideshows' menu item and click on 'General Settings', then go to the 'Custom styles' tab. Here you'll see a list of default stylesheets, such as 'Light' and 'Dark', and a list of custom stylesheets; The ones you created. Choose a default stylesheet you'd like to customize and click 'Customize' to open the 'Custom style editor'. When you're done editing click 'Save Changes' and go to the slideshow you'd like to style with the newly created stylesheet. In the 'Slideshow Style' box you can now find and select your custom stylesheet. You can set a stylesheet for multiple slideshows. If you've already created a custom stylesheet, you can edit it by clicking 'Edit'. You can also delete it by clicking 'Delete'. Be careful with this though, a deleted stylesheet cannot be retrieved and cannot be used by any slideshow anymore.

Yes you can. On your WordPress admin page, go to the 'Slideshows' menu item and click on 'General Settings', then go to the 'User Capabilities' tab (If you're not already there). The privileges that allow user groups to perform certain actions are listed here. To allow, for instance, a contributor to add a slideshow, click the box in front of 'Contributor' to grant him the right to add slideshows. Note that when you grant someone the right to add or delete a slideshow, you'll also automatically grant him or her the right to edit slideshows, as this right is required to add or delete slideshows. The same is true for the reversed situation. The slideshow does not show up The slideshow is mostly called after the </head> tag, which means the scripts and stylesheet need to load in the footer of the website. A theme that has no <?php wp_footer(); ?> call in it's footer will not be able to load the slideshow's scripts. Often when the slideshow isn't showing, there's a javascript error somewhere on the page and this error has caused javascript to break. For the slideshow to work again, this error needs to be fixed. Check if any errors were thrown by opening Google Chrome or Firefox (with Firebug installed) and press the 'F12' key. Errors show in the console tab.

Internet Explorer is a very strict browser, so when a big blank space above your slideshow is showing your page may contain some invalid HTML. Most times invalid HTML is caused by placing the slideshow's shortcode or PHP snippet into an anchor tag (<a></a>) or paragraph tag (<p></p>), while you can only place a slideshow within a 'div' element (<div></div>).

Good question! There are a couple reasons: First, I maintain a site that has hundreds of slideshows and, to be honest, it's more rewarding for me to update the plugin than it is to find a new one and manually convert all the slideshows to whatever the new one is. Secondly, there is a real dearth of good quality, FREE slideshow plugins for Wordpress. I'm not saying this one is the best, but it's pretty good and more or less honors Wordpress UI. There's nothing worse than installing a new slideshow plugin only to find that your admin interface is now an ungodly color with giant, weird fonts and icons and your slideshows are now being stored in the cloud for a monthly fee. Ugh. So, primarily I'll be maintaining this fork to suit my needs but I will entertain suggestions or pull requests. I'm (probably) not going to rewrite this plugin, but I will work to keep it functioning in the up-to-date versions of Wordpress and I'll implement new features as I need them (i.e. the Gutenberg block, which I hope to improve).

Absolutely! I will look at all pull requests on the Github repo. If you have any feedback or suggestions or want to volunteer, please post over on Github. While I will monitor the Wordpress Support forums, I spent a lot of my day on Github so I'm more likely to see your post over there. Thanks in advance for your help in make this the best slideshow plugin available for Wordpress, free or not!