Simple Image Gallery is a free plugin for creating and inserting simple image galleries into Joomla content and modules.
How does Simple Image Gallery work?
The plugin can turn any folder with images into a table gallery with the ability to open images by clicking in modal windows with controls for quick navigation:
To do this, simply insert the path to the folder into the {gallery} tag, for example:
{gallery}sampledata/parks/animals{/gallery}
To ensure that the gallery is displayed without errors, it is enough to know 2 simple rules:
- The path to the folder must be without slashes (symbol "/") at the beginning and at the end.
- The path to the folder must not include the folder for images (by default this is the images folder, you can change it in the plugin settings).
Please note that the plugin archive weighs only 30 KB. This is explained by the minimum of settings and variety: only displaying images as galleries with one style of lightboxes.
Installing Simple Image Gallery
The plugin is installed in the standard way.
After installation, you need to activate the plugin: Extensions → Plugins → Simple Image Gallery (by JoomlaWorks).
Plugin settings
The plugin has only 6 settings:
Root folder for image galleries
Here you specify the initial folder, which should not be included in the path to the final folder with images when inserting the tag {gallery}.
Thumbnail width
Thumbnail width.
Thumbnail height
Thumbnail height.
Thumbnail image quality
The quality of thumbnails generated in JPEG format.
Thumbnail cache expiration time
The storage time for thumbnail images in minutes. You should not set it to 0, because in this case the thumbnails will be generated every time the page is accessed, which will slow down its loading speed.
Memory limit (in MBs)
Server memory limit. It should be used in exceptional cases when the page with the gallery will display a white screen.
Conclusions
Simple Image Gallery is a very simple, narrowly focused plugin designed to display the simplest galleries in the content of pages. It is not suitable if you want to combine gallery elements with text (add titles and captions to images), or you need a variety of gallery output styles with the ability to flexibly customize. For such purposes, use the free sigplus plugin or the paid Simple Image Gallery Pro component.