Adam D.
A good tool badly let down by a lack of metadata synchronicity
I’ve used Envira Gallery for a few years now. It’s generally a good tool, but, there is one MAJOR flaw – a lack of maintainability of image metadata. Once Envira Galleries are created, there is no way to sync/pull/push metadata changes to and from the WordPress media library. What this means is that it is HUGELY EXPENSIVE to maintain metadata changes (think SEO alt text, caption, description and titles) – as you must update and manually sync in multiple places – which is a huge headache if an image features in multiple galleries. For many, image SEO is usually done during or after page design / gallery creation, but Envira assumes otherwise – and that no further metadata updates will ever be made – a TOTAL maintenance nightmare! Furthermore, I SADLY tried out the ‘watermarking’ feature – and it has crazily renamed ALL my images using the format ‘watermarking-[md5-hash].jpg’ – which negatively impacts SEO as meaningful filenames are very important. What a bad mistake to make. It then turns out that there is no clean way to rename these ‘watermarked*[md5-hash].jpg’ images without breaking the envira galleries on the wordpress back end. The Envira Support team, whilst generally helpful in attitude, were unable to fix the issue, didn’t really acknowledge that it was a bad fail on their part (but did add it as a feature request) – and suggested I used third party tools to clean up the mess – apparently this was outside of the scope of support. So – having spent some 30-40 hours trying various fixes, engaging time from my web developers, and eventually having to manually clean up the broken metadata and filenames – it probably cost me AT LEAST a couple of thousand dollars to fix. Not really ideal for the average small business owner. Over the years I’ve raised numerous issues with this plugin – and nothing has every been fixed. It seems the prioritisation is on revenue generation via new features – instead of actually fixing existing problems – a bit microsloppy. The moral of the story is – if you are NOT bothered about SEO, and ongoing image metadata maintenance (especially given the new AI tools that can now help improve existing image SEO metadata) – then this is the tool for you. If you want a gallery that cares about metadata and SEO synchronicity with WP Media Library – find something better.
Response from Envira GalleryAug 13, 2026
Hi Adam, Thank you for the detailed feedback, and we're sorry the experience shared here caused the disruption it did. Gallery metadata is stored per gallery, so a caption can differ from one gallery to the next and from the library itself. That's why edits made in the Media Library don't automatically flow through to Envira galleries already built. If you need a gallery to pick up current library metadata today, re-adding the image to it will recapture those values. You're right that the Watermarking addon saves the watermarked copy under a hashed filename, which avoids cache collisions so it loads correctly. However, we understand a hashed name still gives up something you'd rather keep, as filename is one of the SEO signals Google uses for images, alongside the heavy lifting done by alt text and title attributes. As you found, there isn't a way to work around this without the galleries losing track of the images. Our support team explored a custom workaround with you, and while it didn't work out as we'd hoped, we've shared your feedback with the product team so a built-in filename option can be considered in a future release. We appreciate you having used Envira Gallery these past few years, and in passing your message along to our team, it has us taking a hard look at where we can better support workflows like yours. Improving what's already in the plugin carries as much weight with us as what comes next. Thank you again for sharing your thoughts. If anything else comes up, feedback or otherwise, our team is here and happy to help. Warmly, The Envira Gallery Team