photography

12 Free Static Gallery Generator, Convert Photo Folders to Websites

Hazem Abbas

Feb 1, 2023 — 8 min read

Static website generators are outstanding tools that allow you to create a quick website in no time, without the need to worry about database setup or even complex server configuration.

Static Gallery Generators are basically the same thing, with a little twist, It aids photographers to create a creative, interactive gallery in a static website form, with few steps. Moreover, a static website does not require a heavy server to run.

If you are looking for a static website generator, you may check out the post about the best 20 open source static generators.

They are ideal alternative solutions to the self-hosted heavy loaded gallery organizers, that require database, extensive setup and heavy server requirements.

Some of them require experienced users who can understand and follow the setup, and config instructions to the letter. Some are pretty easy to use.

In this post we will explore the best open source static gallery generator.

1- Sigal - Simple Static Gallery Generator

Sigal is yet another simple static gallery generator. It's written in Python, and it allows building a static gallery of images with the following features:

Process directories recursively.
Generate HTML pages using Jinja2 templates.
Relative links for a portable output.
Support themes, videos, EXIF tags, zip download.
Parallel processing.
MIT licensed.

The idea behind Sigal is to ease the use of the JavaScript libraries like galleria. These libraries do a great job to display the images, Sigal does what is missing: resize images, create thumbnails, generate HTML pages.

Sigal is compatible with Python 3.5+.

2- Prosopopee

Prosopopee is a static site generator for your story. It enables you to make beautiful customizable pictures galleries that tell a story using a static website generator written in Python. You don't need to care about CSS, code and presentation, manage your contents in YAML file and Prosopopee will take care about the rest.

Prosopopee is sections oriented, make it very flexible, many kinds of sections already available:

Parallax
Group of pics (gallery)
Paragraph
Iframe (YouTube, Maps, etc..)
Quote

3- Simple Photo Gallery

Simple Photo Gallery is a simple command line tool written in Python that helps you create static HTML photo and video galleries that tell a story. Thumbnails, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files are generated automatically and can be uploaded to any static hosting, like for example AWS S3 or Netlify. The most important features:

Responsive layout suitable for any device (including touch gestures support).
Image captions extracted from the image metadata (EXIF tags).
Fully customizable layout with sensible defaults to get started quickly.
Create a gallery from an existing OneDrive or Google Photos album, without downloading the photos.
Automatic upload of the gallery to AWS S3 or Netlify.
Based on the PhotoSwipe JavaScript library.

4- fgallery

“fgallery” is a static photo gallery generator with no frills that has a stylish, minimalist look. “fgallery” shows your photos, and nothing else.

There is no server-side processing, only static generation. The resulting gallery can be uploaded anywhere without additional requirements and works with any modern browser.

Automatically orients pictures without quality loss.
Multi-camera friendly: automatically sorts pictures by time: just throw your (and your friends) photos and movies in a directory. The resulting gallery shows the pictures in seamless shooting order.
Adapts to the current screen size and proportions, switching from horizontal/vertical layout and scaling thumbnails automatically.
Supports face detection for improved thumbnail centering.
Loads fast! Especially over slow connections.
Includes original (raw) pictures in a zip file for downloading.
Panoramas can be seen full-size by default.

5- Gallery Generator

This is a Jekyll plugin that generates galleries from directories full of images. It uses RMagick to create thumbnails.

This plugin is quite minimalist. It generates galleries with no pagination, no sub-galleries, and no descriptions.

6- Hugo Easy Gallery

Hugo is a free open source static website generator written in Go language. Hugo Easy Gallery is a plugin that allows you to create and embed galleries in your Hugo generated sites with one-line shortcode. Moreover, it supports PhotoSwipe and Lightbox outside the box.

7- MinigalNano

MinigalNano is a very simple image gallery. It adheres to the KISS principle and is very easy to install. MinigalNano does not have a web admin interface: You just upload your images in the photo folder on your server (using FTP, SFTP...).

It only requires PHP and GD (no database, no special libraries like PEAR or ImageMagick).

MinigalNano uses a JavaScript Lightbox (Use left/right arrows for navigation), but it degrades gracefully if JavaScript is disabled.

MinigalNano Features

Very simple media gallery
Support for PNG, GIF, JPEG image formats
Support for OGV ad WEBM video
JavaScript lightbox, degrades graceful if JavaScript is disabled.

9 - PHP Gallery

PHP Gallery is a free open source static web gallery generator written in PHP.

10- Photish

Photish is a simple, convention based (but configurable) static photo site generator. It allows you to group your photo collections by folder. Metadata can be written alongside the photo in a YAML file with the same name as the photo.

Photish will crawl through your directory of photos and metadata, and render the information in your website templates. It supports all template engines implemented by Tilt (currently over 30 formats).

It will also read your configuration and automatically convert your images to your configured size, dimensions, color scheme, and others using ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick. Using this information, Photish creates a complete static website that can be hosted on an NGINX, Apache HTTP Server, or even on GitHub Pages.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

11- gallery.sh

Bash Script to generate static web galleries. No server-side programs (i.e. PHP, MySQL) required.

gallery.sh is a simple bash shell script which generates static html thumbnail (image, photo) galleries using the convert and jhead command-line utilities. It requires no special server-side script to run to view image galleries because everything is pre-rendered.

It offers several features:

Responsive layout
Thumbnails which fill the browser efficiently
Download the original image file
Nice and simple Bootstrap CSS layout
Locally previewable galleries by accessing images locally (e.g. file:///home/nils/pics/gallery/index.html)
JPEG header EXIF data extraction
Autorotation of vertical images

This combination of features makes a better user experience than pretty much all the big online photo hosts. All you need is a place to host your plain html and jpeg files. This can also be Amazon S3.