Every install gets a front-end archive of the whole library, with search, filters, sorting and pagination, at a URL you choose.
Where it lives
By default /photos/ for the archive and /photo/<name>/ for a
single item. Both slugs are yours to change in Settings › URLs.
After changing either slug, visit Settings › Permalinks and click Save once. WordPress caches its URL rules and will keep serving 404s until it is told to rebuild them. This is the single most common support question about any plugin that adds URLs.
What visitors get
- A search box covering titles, text fields and tag names.
- A dropdown for every field you marked Filter on the Fields screen.
- Sorting, and pagination at the number of photos per page you set.
- A click through to the photo page, or straight into the lightbox if you prefer.
Filters combine. Choosing a person and a year narrows to photos matching both, and the choices stay in the URL, so a filtered view can be linked to and bookmarked.
Using a saved display instead
Settings › Archive page › Use a saved display swaps the built-in archive for one of your own displays. Everything that display specifies — layout, captions, which controls visitors see — applies to the archive page.
Do this when the built-in archive shows more filters than your collection needs, or when you want the archive to look like the rest of your galleries.
Tag archive pages
Every tags and single-choice field is a taxonomy, so each value has its own page:
/photos/people/ana/
/photos/album/italy-1994/
/photos/tags/black-and-white/Nothing to configure. These are ordinary WordPress term archives, so your menus, your SEO plugin and your theme all treat them normally.
Lightbox
Clicking a photo can open the lightbox rather than the photo page — on the archive by a setting, on a display by its Click opens control. The lightbox steps through the current set with the arrow keys, closes on Escape, on the ✕, or on a click outside the photo.
The lightbox shows your preview size, not the original. See Protecting your photos.
Search engines
Filtered, searched, sorted and paged views all carry a canonical tag pointing at the plain archive, so search engines index one page instead of every combination of filters. Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO and SEOPress are corrected through their own canonical filters, so there is no conflict with whichever you use.
Gallery images fall back to the item’s title for alt text when the attachment has none. An attachment’s own alt is always kept, and a title that is only a file name is not used.
Theme templates
Classic themes load archive-photo.php and single-photo.php from the
plugin. Copy either into your theme folder to override it. Block themes get the same two as block
templates, editable in the Site Editor, and 
for building your own.