Photo Galleries

I logged in this morning because I wanted to build a new web based photo gallery. I was absolutely shocked and disappointed to find that this BASIC feature (and it looks like a lot of people are wanting it) does not exist! Why is there not an easy webflow photo gallery tool? And if I am an idiot and there is one… where is it?

I need this for my photography business.

This is something I found online that looks great, but why isn’t this functionality part of webflow? I would really rather NOT pay extra. Is there a competing service to webflow that has excellent photo galleries? Can I build a gallery in Adobe Lightroom and export it to webflow? Again, I don’t want the added expense of extra hosting expenses, etc. I just want a one-stop shop for all my web stuff.

Still really just shocked webflow doesnt seem to have this.

Webflow is targeted at designers, who want maximum control over layout, styling, and behavior - so complex pre-made elements generally don’t make the cut. You build them instead.

A photo gallery is typically built with;

  • a CMS collection for your photos, captions, tags, credits…
  • a Collection list to display those photos
  • laid out using a CSS grid
  • often using the lightbox element to display a larger view

Grid layout is popular, and the simplest to implement, but there are other layout options too… masonry, carousel, justified masonry ( like flickr ), collage…

Some more details on those layout differences here;

And any time you’re not sure how to build something, your first stop should be to check Made in Webflow cloneables. There you can view the project in a designer and see exactly how it was built.

Thanks for the info, I will check it out. But respectfully, I believe you are working from a false premise. I know a BUNCH of content creators (many of whom I referred) who use webflow because it is easier than most WSIWYG editors out there, and in fact - does have many pre-made elements. I don’t have the time to design a web image gallery. I want to drop 100 images and go. I’m a photographer… while I am fairly web savvy, I am not a web designer. Nor do I want to be.

Which is why I use webflow.

Heh heh, I think you’ve flipped sides in your perspective here. In your initial post you were frustrated that Webflow doesn’t have a photo gallery component, and I explained why.

Now it feels like you’re trying to convince me that Webflow has everything you need and that it’s a simple 101-Wix-level tool anyone can use. But clearly it isn’t - or you would not have had to ask your question to begin with.

Typically tech solutions follow a curve. At the low end solutions are cheap and easy to use, but limited. Point it and push a button and it does its thing, like a kid’s camera. At the other end of the curve is capability and power, but that comes with cost, and a steep learning curve.

A $50k Phase One XF IQ4 150MP might be an amazing camera, but I wouldn’t recommend it as a first camera to anyone - especially if they had no interest in becoming a photographer.

Have a glance at WP’s plugins directory. You’ll see everything from photo galleries to social media widgets to multi-step forms, e-commerce, SEO, membership systems, sliders, accordions, maps, charting tools, chat systems, commenting systems, etc. Tons of options. More than 58,000 plug-ins.

By comparison, Webflow has a small handful - tabs, basic forms, basic slider, basic map, and a couple of others. That’s intentional, because Webflow designers can’t use complex elements if they can’t fully control and style them, and the more complex the element is, the more complex those behaviors and styling become.

Even something as simple as forms has sparked an entire industry of companies that solve that one area of problems. Other companies just do photo galleries, or chat systems, or e-commerce, or memberships…

A basic gallery is super easy to build, takes 30 seconds or less in Webflow, if you know what you’re doing. Many people just find a cloneable they like and then copy the elements they want over to their site.

That won’t happen on Webflow. Even if you use the CMS, you’ll need to create those items and upload each photo individually, or else build an infrastructure that can do that from an external file repo like dropbox.

I think Webflow is great, but I would never recommend it to a non-designer. That’s rather like recommending a Lamborghini as someone’s first car, or recommending that someone buy and learn Photoshop because they want to convert an image from GIF to JPEG.

Those are wrong tools for the needs of those users.

If you don’t want to be a designer, you might reconsider why you are choosing a platform that requires designer skills to build your site. For non-designers, Wix, Squarespace, and Wordpress are typically a better and cheaper fit.

@jw83876 - As a photographer that enjoys control over my work I suggest you look at smugmug.com. Designed for exactly what you want.

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Consider WordPress or Squarespace; both offer robust photo gallery features without extra hosting costs. Explore Lightroom plugins for web integration.

No one wants to add 100 photos manually. And if you use a Lightbox, thats double the work! A more seamless option for adding large volumes of photos is a NO BRAINER. My theory is that Webflow makes it intentionally harder to minimize the number of photos uploaded to its servers.

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