Snapshot is a showcase-style theme, suitable for portfolio websites or photo galleries. It’s a rare free theme release from the WooThemes team, who usually produce paid WordPress themes exclusively. I’ll be going over this free WordPress theme in a review post.

And now onto the review…

My Expectations

Aside from a clean looking showcase-style design, I’m expecting to make use of some third-party plugins. In the demo I noticed what appeared to be WP-PostRatings. We’ll see if this plugin is required to use the theme or not. I’m also expecting to use some form of custom fields to call the images.

I’m also expecting not to get any help from WooThemes developers, since you have to pay for that, kind of like everything else on the site.

Setting Up

When you first upload and activate this theme, you’ll get a site that looks like this.

Not very pretty, is it?

To fix this, you’ll need to open up the Snapshot Options panel, select a theme stylesheet, and save the changes. I’m not sure why the default one isn’t activated by default, but I guess it’s easy enough to change if you know what you’re doing.

Options Panel

In the previously mentioned options page, you can also control a few other things:

• Choose between a photo or design gallery
• The theme stylesheet (default, coolblue, limefresh)
• Full URL to custom logo image
• Google Analytics code (or other tracking code)
• FeedBurner RSS URL

Required Plugins

On the theme’s documentation page, it’s states there are two required plugins: WP-PostRatings and WP-PageNavi. By default, you don’t necessarily need the PostRatings plugin. Although if you want any pagination functionality at all, you will need the PageNavi plugin. There doesn’t appear to be any fallback on the default WordPress pagination system.

Photo Gallery? Design Gallery?

The difference between the photo gallery and design gallery is that the photo gallery is designed to showcase your own images, and therefore will internally link to your own WordPress posts. The design gallery is programmed to function like one of those “best design galleries” and will link out to external sites instead.

How Do I Add Posts?

You can add posts like normal. Input the title and content, choose the category and add tags. With this theme, you’ll notice a new set of extra input fields in your write menu.

The screenshot is the image displayed on the homepage. The larger image is displayed on single post pages (in photo gallery mode only). The website URL is used for the external link in design gallery mode.

I think this is a nice alternative to custom fields, as those tend to confuse people. This new menu is much more straightforward.

Support

If you need any help with this theme, don’t bother contacting WooThemes about it, because they’ll ignore you if you don’t pay for access to the forums. Access to WooThemes’ support forums cost $40 per year. Whether or not this is worth it is up to you. I didn’t encounter any major problems that required support in my experience with the Snapshot theme.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I really liked this theme, and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a showcase-style template. I think this one is a lot better than the last showcase-style theme I reviewed, Infinity, because Snapshot is much more “generic” and easier to get set up.