A very simple and opinionated photo gallery theme for Hugo.

• Demo
• Example site source

• Responsive design
• Dark color scheme (can be set per page)
• Private albums
• Automatic (or manual) selection of feature images
• Justified album views with Flickr's Justified Layout
• Lightbox with PhotoSwipe
• SEO with Open Graph tags

This theme requires Hugo Extended >= 0.121.2. Dependencies are bundled, so no Node.js/NPM and PostCSS is needed.

Requires the Go binary installed.

$ hugo mod init github.com/<your_user>/<your_project>

Then add the theme to your hugo.toml:

[module]
  [[module.imports]]
    path = "github.com/nicokaiser/hugo-theme-gallery/v4"

$ git submodule add --depth=1 https://github.com/nicokaiser/hugo-theme-gallery.git themes/gallery

Page bundles which contain at least one image are listed as album or gallery:

content/
├── _index.md
├── about.md             <-- not listed in album list
├── animals/
│   ├── _index.md
│   ├── cats/
│   |   ├── index.md
│   |   ├── cat1.jpg
│   |   └── feature.jpg  <-- album thumbnail
│   ├── dogs/
│   |   ├── index.md
│   |   ├── dog1.jpg     <-- album thumbnail
│   |   └── dog2.jpg
│   └── feature.jpg
├── bridge.jpg           <-- site thumbnail (OpenGraph, etc.)
└── nature/
    ├── index.md         <-- contains `featured_image: images/tree.jpg`
    ├── images/
    |   └── tree.jpg     <-- album thumbnail
    ├── nature1.jpg
    └── nature2.jpg

• /about.md is not a Page Bundle and does not have image resources. It is not displayed in the album list.
• /nature is a Leaf Bundle (has index.md and no children) => displayed as gallery (single layout).
• /animals is a Branch Bundle (has _index.md and has children) => displayed as album list (list layout).
• The image resource with *feature* in its name or the first image found is used as thumbnail image for album lists.
• Albums without an image are not shown.

• title -- title of the album, shown in the album list and on the album page.
• date -- album date, used for sorting (newest first).
• description -- description shown on the album page.
• featured_image -- name of the image file used for the album thumbnail. If not set, the first image which contains feature in its filename is used, otherwise the first image in the album.
• weight -- can be used to adjust sort order.
• private -- if set to true, this album is not shown in the album overview and is excluded from RSS feeds.
• featured -- if set to true, this album is featured on the homepage (even if private).
• sort_by -- property used for sorting images in an album. Default is Name (filename), but can also be Date.
• sort_order -- sort order. Default is asc.
• params.theme -- color theme for this page. Defaults to defaultTheme from configuration.

Image titles for the lightbox view are either taken from the ImageDescription EXIF tag, or the title in the resource metadata.

EXIF tags can be written using software like Adobe Lightroom or by using command line tools like exiftool:

exiftool -ImageDescription="A closeup of a gray cat's face" cat-4.jpg

Alternatively, the image title can be set in the front matter:

---
date: 2024-02-18T14:12:44+0100
title: Cats
resources:
  - src: cat-1.jpg
    title: Brown tabby cat on white stairs
    params:
      date: 2024-02-18T13:04:30+0100
  - src: cat-2.jpg
    title: Selective focus photography of orange and white cat on brown table
---

On the homepage, up to one featured album (featured: true in the front matter) is displayed. Note: featured albums are displayed on the homepage, even if they are private.

If related content is available for your site (e.g. when keywords or tags are used), related albums are shown below each gallery. Read more about this in the Hugo Docs.

Use the socialIcons configuration key to add social icons on the bottom of each page:

[params]
  ...
  [params.socialIcons]
    facebook = "https://www.facebook.com/"
    instagram = "https://www.instagram.com/"
    github = "https://github.com/nicokaiser/hugo-theme-gallery/"
    youtube = "https://www.youtube.com/"
    email = "mailto:[email protected]"

The theme is very opinionated but kept simple to you can create a customized version. CSS is generated with Hugo Pipes, so you can add additional CSS in assets/css/custom.css (see example in exampleSite).

• Nico Kaiser