WooThumbs Overview
WooThumbs ($18) is a really useful little plugin to improve your WooCommerce product image display. WooThumbs gives you a few tools to make product photos easier to navigate and more contextual for customers. With WooThumbs installed, you can:
- display product images in an on-gesture carousel that works well on desktop and mobile for easy navigation (while you can make the carousel scroll automatically, I would avoid this)
- allow customers to “cloud zoom” or hover to zoom on product images to view greater detail
- open images in a full-screen view to get a better look
- add variation-specific images so that, when a variation is selected, customers only see the relevant images for that variation
- add product videos that will open full-screen so customers don’t have to leave your site to view videos to see products in action
If you want to check out a live demo of the plugin you can get a feel for how it modifies and upgrades the default product image display. You can even use the “customize” icon to the left to see what settings are available.
WooThumbs Review: Setup & Configuration
Once you have the plugin installed, you can begin with basic configuration under WooCommerce > WooThumbs. Since WooThumbs uses the Redux Framework for its settings, you’ll need to install the Redux Framework plugin as well to get to this page and activate the enhanced product images.
I wasn’t a fan of installing another plugin to use WooThumbs, but I got in touch with the plugin author, and he’s already in progress on removing this settings framework, and thus the need for the additional plugin, which is nice to hear.
Once you’ve got both plugins up and running, the WooThumbs settings page will let you adjust everything from how the main image and thumbnails are displayed to the width of the slider on the page.
I’d recommend having a look at a product page while you adjust configuration so you can see what each setting does after you’ve saved it.
While you’re viewing the settings page, you can go through each tab to configure settings on what transitions your product images use, what color the icons for navigation are, what kind of image zoom is used, and others.
WooThumbs Review: Other Comments
While WooThumbs gives your product images some nice upgrades and context for variations, there are a couple things I’d love to see improved.
First, there are lots of settings. While this isn’t a bad thing, when you can’t see what the settings are doing and have to keep refreshing a product page to see them, it can take some time to configure.
Several settings would benefit from using the WordPress Customizer — many settings directly modify the frontend appearance, and thus seeing how they change a sample product page in real time would make setup far quicker and prevent flipping back and forth between settings and a frontend product page.
Next, settings that don’t modify appearance could leverage the WooCommerce settings API to add them in a settings tab. This would also give the added benefit of removing the need for the Redux Framework plugin completely, which is apparently a change that’s already in progress for the plugin.
I would also love to see some bulk actions for WooThumbs product settings. For example, a bulk action to disable WooThumbs for the product would be helpful if you want to disable the enhanced product images for an entire product category. Likewise, you may want to re-use a video URL for a category, and setting these in bulk is very helpful.
WooThumbs Review: Upgraded Product Images
Overall, WooThumbs is an easy-to-use plugin that enhances your WooCommerce product images. Images are easier to navigate using a mobile-friendly image slider, as customers can use the expected swipes to navigate images, and click on thumbnails to make them the main product image. Swiping to scroll through images is also much easier than using the tiny “arrow” tap target in the image lightbox.
Images can also be viewed in full screen (mobile and desktop), and can be inspected closer with a “hover to zoom” feature. The enhanced image section blends into most themes, and can be adjusted easily for each theme.
Adding variation images is a nice bonus to give product images more context, as they can be tied to a specific variation. Product videos are also handy to give your customers more visual representations of your products without sending them off to YouTube or another site, keeping them where the purchasing happens.
At $18, WooThumbs delivers great value to upgrade your WooCommerce product images, provide a much better mobile image browsing experience, and add video or variation image support.
