Wix App · v1.6.0 · Live on the Wix App Market
Gallery, Slideshow & Lightbox
Five arrangements, a real lightbox, and every tile asking for a picture its own size — with no cap on pictures and no badge, on any plan.
- No cap on pictures
- Lightbox included
- Loads light
- No badge
The gap it closes
Wix’s own gallery is 3.2★ over 4,029 reviews, and the loudest cluster is not a missing feature — it is the thing not working. “Doesnt work in mobile, shows no images” — 8 votes. “This Wix Pro Gallery App/Slider is NOT Reliable … My images are currently not working at all” — 6. “NOT SHOWING ON MOBILE VIEW” — 3. And more, all of them recent: “unable to see the gallery afte published — I’m able to see it in preview mode but after publish all my gallery are invisible” · “Images stop showing suddenly. I have never had the problem before.” · “images on live site not appearing neither on the desktop or mobile site, please fix!”
The second cluster is weight. “Deixa o site muito lento: minha homepage fica extremamente lenta com esse app” (August 2026) · “Useless if you have more than 2 ‘pro’ galleries. It will freeze every time you attempt to manage the media.” · and next door, on the 4.2★/1,597 rival, “very slow to load — it makes the page very glitchy” and “This widget slows down site speed and causes lighthouse failing score.” The 4.1★/585 app has a reviewer who diagnosed it exactly: “There are no options for pagination or lazy loading, so it loads EVERY image onLoad. This makes it basically useless unless you only have a few images.”
The third is the expand view, and one two-vote review reads like a specification: “Once in the expand mode of the gallery there is no easy way to go back to the main page. You either have to use escape or a back arrow. This is extremely confusing. Either add a customization to allow some kind of X … It would also be nice if there was an option to include thumbnails along with the arrows between pieces.” Every word of that is built here, and it is free.
Nine rivals’ own pricing pages were read on the day this was built. Four have no free plan at all — $8.34/mo, “$7,5/mo” twice over, and one whose three tiers are a storage bill at $5.56 for fifty images, $6.95 for a thousand and $18.09 for no limit. Four print their own name on the customer’s website until you pay to remove it: the 4.2★/1,597 app’s free tier is, in its own words, “3 slides per slideshow after trial”, “2 captions per slide after trial” and “Logo and watermark after trial”. Three ration the picture count — three slides, six photographs, fifty images.
And the lightbox — the thing a gallery is for — is a $9.73-a-month feature on the 4.1★/585 app, alongside its search box and its alt text. Dragging to zoom into a picture is $4.16 a month two doors down. Here all of it is on the free plan, and none of it will ever move.
How it works
Three steps, then it runs itself.
- 01
Pick your pictures where they already are
Open your own media library and select as many as you like at once — this app never receives an upload and never stores a photograph. It keeps one line of text saying where each picture lives. Nothing of yours moves, nothing is duplicated, and there is no storage bill to ration.
- 02
Choose how it is laid out
An even grid, masonry at natural heights, justified rows flush to both edges, a slideshow, or a scrolling carousel. Any shape of tile or none, cropping with a focal point so a face survives it, or never cropping at all. Captions under the picture, on it, on hover or off. Colours that follow your page so it reads on a dark site. All free.
- 03
Put it wherever you want it, as often as you want
Drag it onto any page as many times as you like. Each placement can show the whole gallery or a single album, with its own arrangement — so the same pictures serve a dozen pages and are only kept once. It creates no pages and adds nothing to your menu.
How it behaves
The decisions that matter.
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No cap on pictures, on any plan
Not on the free plan, not on any plan. The apps on this shelf stop free at three slides, six photographs and fifty images; there is no number here you can exceed.
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The lightbox is free, and it is a proper one
A thumbnail strip, a picture counter, arrows, the keyboard, swipe on a phone, zoom and drag, a readable link to each picture, and a close button you can see. The app next door charges $9.73 a month for the lightbox and $4.16 more for the dragging.
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No watermark and no badge, on any plan, ever
Not on the page, not in the editor. Four of the nine apps on this shelf print their own name on your website until you pay them to stop.
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Every tile asks for a picture its own size
Measured on a published page: a tile drawn 238 pixels wide downloads a 240-pixel picture, not the photograph. Twelve of them came to 25 kB where the originals are 415 kB — and on a real photograph the gap is far wider, because a 1.2 MB picture becomes a 1.6 kB tile.
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One request per placement
Measured on a published page: exactly one call for the whole gallery, and then zero more for searching, filtering by album, changing the order, opening the lightbox, stepping through it, zooming or closing it.
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Nothing on the page jumps when the pictures land
Every tile is told its shape before the bytes arrive, so the text below it never moves. Everything past the first row waits until it is needed.
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This app never receives an upload and never stores a picture
Your photographs stay in your own media library. If every trace of this app vanished tonight, every picture would still be exactly where you put it — which is also why there is no gigabyte to bill you for.
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It reads on a dark site
The default paints no background of its own and takes its text colour from your page, so it is legible on white and on black without choosing anything. Pick an explicit light or dark panel instead and it insets and rounds itself properly.
-
Alt text and structured data are free
Every picture takes alt text, the search reads it, and the gallery emits ImageGallery structured data. The app next door sells alt text at $9.73 a month, and two of the incumbent’s reviews are simply “images dont show up on google”.
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It measures nothing about your visitors
No cookie, no local storage, no session, no identifier, no third-party request. On Business, where opens are counted, one row records that a picture was opened — and nothing whatsoever about who opened it.
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Your gallery is your own data
Every picture, caption, line of alt text and album is an ordinary row in your own site’s content manager, exportable to a spreadsheet on every plan, at any time.
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It reads on a phone
Measured at 390 pixels on a published page: two columns, chips wrapping cleanly, no horizontal scrolling on the page or in the widget — and a 480-pixel picture downloaded for a 190-pixel tile on a dense screen, rather than the photograph.
Pricing
Free tier that actually works.
Billed per site through the Wix App Market, monthly or yearly (yearly saves 20%). Every paid plan starts with a 14-day free trial. The free plan is deliberately functional and never expires, so the app can prove itself on a real site before you pay for it.
Free
$0
Pro
$9.99/mo
or $95.88/yr
Business
$19.99/mo
or $191.88/yr
Documentation & data handling
Everything it touches, stated plainly.
Installing & getting started
- Add Gallery, Slideshow & Lightbox to your Wix site from the App Market and approve the permissions listed below.
- Open it from your site dashboard under Apps. It adds the Gallery element (editor widget, any page, any number of times) / Dashboard page.
- Follow the three steps above. The free tier covers one gallery with no cap on pictures, all five arrangements — grid, masonry, justified rows, slideshow and carousel — and every design control including colours that follow a dark site, any tile shape, cropping with a nine-point focal point or never cropping at all, and captions under the picture, on it, on hover or off; the full lightbox with its thumbnail strip, counter, arrows, keyboard, swipe, zoom and drag, readable per-picture links and a visible close; albums with reader filter chips; a search that reads captions, alt text, descriptions and tags; alt text and ImageGallery structured data; thumbnails asked for at the size they are drawn with lazy loading below the fold; and CSV export, so you can prove it works before paying.
- Stuck? Email [email protected] — two business days response.
Permissions, and why each one
SCOPE.DEV_CENTER.APP-INSTANCE-READ-BASIC-INFO- Read which plan the site is on, so Pro and Business features unlock.
What is stored, and where
- Your gallery — every picture address, caption, line of alt text, album, wording and design choice — is stored in collections inside your own site, and is exportable to a CSV at any time on any plan.
- No photograph is ever uploaded to this app or stored by it. A picture is an address, and the picture itself stays in your own media library where you put it.
- Nothing at all is written to a visitor’s device: no cookie, no local storage, no session, no identifier.
- On Business, where opens are counted, one row records which gallery and which picture, and when. Never who.
- Nothing is sent to any third party. The app fetches nothing from anybody and has no mail server.
- Uninstalling removes the app’s collections. Your pictures are untouched, because they were never ours to remove.
Technical detail
- Version
- 1.6.0
- Hosting
- Wix (the app runs on Wix’s own infrastructure — no servers of ours)
- Runtime
- Wix CLI app — Astro + React, Node.js
- Authentication
- Wix app-instance identity, verified on every request
- Wix surfaces
- Gallery element (editor widget, any page, any number of times), Dashboard page
- App ID
c488bd86-1150-432e-b073-1c97ea904314- Support
- [email protected]
- Support SLA
- Two business days
- Publisher
- Builds By Luke, Canada
Questions people ask.
How is this different from your Video Gallery app?
This one is photographs; that one is video. This app holds pictures, lays them out five ways and opens them in a lightbox — it plays nothing and embeds nothing. If you want YouTube or Vimeo playlists on a page, Video Gallery & Playlists is the one. If you want a picture on a picture — points, labels or a before-and-after slider — Image Hotspots and Before & After are separate apps, and this one deliberately does none of it.
How many pictures can a free gallery hold?
As many as you like. There is no cap on pictures on any plan, and there never will be. Three of the nine apps on this shelf stop free at three slides, six photographs or fifty images, and one bills by the gigabyte from $5.56 to $18.09 a month.
Is the lightbox really on the free plan?
Yes, all of it — the thumbnail strip, the counter, the arrows, the keyboard, swipe on a phone, zoom and drag, a readable link to each picture and a close button you can see. The 4.1★ app on this shelf sells its lightbox at $9.73 a month and has a one-star review that reads, in full: “Not having carousel/lightbox on free plan ...a deal breaker.”
Will it slow my page down?
It is built the other way round. Every tile asks for a picture the size of the tile rather than downloading the photograph, everything past the first row waits until it is needed, and a placement makes exactly one request — searching, filtering and opening a picture make none. Measured on a published page: twelve tiles came to 25 kB where the originals are 415 kB, and a 1.2 MB photograph becomes a 1.6 kB tile.
Do my photographs get uploaded to you?
No, and they never will be. You pick pictures from your own media library and the app keeps one line of text saying where each one lives. Nothing is copied, nothing is stored by us, and there is no storage quota — which is why three of the apps on this shelf can charge by the gigabyte and this one cannot.
Is there a watermark on the free plan?
No, and there is none on any plan, ever. Four of the nine apps on this shelf print their own name on your website; the 4.2★ one lists “Logo and watermark after trial” as a feature of its free tier.
My pictures keep getting cropped. Can I stop that?
Yes, two ways, both free. Set the gallery to show the whole picture and nothing is ever cropped. Or keep the tiles filled and give each picture a focal point — nine positions — so a crop keeps the part that matters. “No way to stop images from being cropped … it keeps cropping my images into thin rectangles” is a three-vote review on the app this replaces.
Can I put different pictures on different pages?
Yes. Group pictures into albums and pin any placement to a single album — that is free, and it means one gallery serves a dozen pages with the pictures kept only once. On Pro you can keep several separate galleries as well, and draw your albums as cover tiles that open their own set.
My site is dark. Will the captions be readable?
Yes. By default the gallery paints no background of its own and takes its text colour from your page, so it reads correctly on a dark site and a light one without setting anything. Choose an explicit light or dark panel instead and it insets and rounds itself properly rather than running its text into the edge.
Does it work on a phone?
Yes, and it was measured rather than assumed: at 390 pixels the grid drops to two columns, the album chips wrap, nothing scrolls sideways, and the lightbox takes a swipe. Because the narrow layout asks the widget its own width rather than the browser’s, it is right wherever you put it — including inside a column.
What happens if I stop using the app?
Your gallery is ordinary rows in your own site’s data — visible in your content manager and exportable to a CSV at any time, on any plan, free included. Your photographs were never held by us at all, so they are exactly where you left them.
Does it work on Wix Studio?
Yes. It is a custom element, so it runs on Wix Studio, the classic Wix Editor and Wix Harmony — the same app and the same settings panel. It was built and verified on a published Wix Studio page and on a published classic Wix page.
Put Gallery, Slideshow & Lightbox on your site.
Add it, use the free plan on a real site, and only pay once it has earned it.