Hello Simvoly Team,
first of all, thank you for the continuous improvements you bring to the platform — we’ve been building client sites with Simvoly and overall enjoy working with it.
I’d like to suggest an improvement to one specific widget that, in our experience, currently falls short of what modern websites need: the gallery widget.
The current situation
The existing gallery widget feels like it was developed out of the slideshow component rather than as a true gallery. On real-world image sets — especially mixed portrait/landscape photos — it doesn’t produce a clean, professional layout. Images either get awkwardly cropped, leave whitespace at the end of rows, or break inconsistently on mobile devices. For any client whose website depends on visual presentation (photographers, restaurants, hotels, designers, real estate, e-commerce), this is a real limitation.
What a modern gallery should do
The industry standard today is a justified (“liquid”) layout — the same approach used by Flickr, 500px and Google Photos. Rows are filled completely, image widths scale proportionally, and the layout reflows cleanly across all breakpoints without gaps or cropping artifacts.
A great open-source reference (with a live, interactive demo) is here:
https://miromannino.github.io/Justified-Gallery/
You can resize the browser window on that page to see exactly what “liquid” means in practice — the gallery responds fluidly without ever looking broken.
Suggested configuration options for the widget panel
Based on what end users actually need, the widget would ideally expose:
Layout mode: Justified / Grid / Masonry
Row height (slider, e.g. 100–400px)
Spacing between images (slider, 0–20px)
Last row behavior: justify / left-align / hide
Sort order: manual / date ascending / date descending / random
Lightbox on/off (with swipe support for mobile)
Mobile breakpoint behavior (columns per device)
Why this benefits Simvoly
A few reasons this would be a strong investment:
Competitive parity. Wix, Squarespace, Webflow and Showit all offer justified/masonry galleries out of the box. This is currently a comparison point where Simvoly visibly lags behind.
Mobile-first credibility. A liquid gallery is one of the most visible proofs of “this builder handles mobile properly.” It’s something prospects evaluate within the first minute of testing.
Broader target audience. A proper gallery widget unlocks Simvoly for visually-driven niches (photography, hospitality, design, architecture, weddings) that currently have to look elsewhere.
No need to reinvent the wheel. The underlying algorithm has been open source for years. Libraries like Justified-Gallery (linked above) or Flickr’s own justified-layout engine could serve as a technical foundation, dramatically reducing development effort.
Agency-friendly. Agencies like ours build and maintain many client sites on Simvoly. A solid gallery widget removes one of the most common reasons we have to use workarounds or external embeds.
I’d be happy to provide more detail or examples if useful — and if you’d like input from an agency perspective during the design phase, I’d gladly contribute.
Thanks for considering this, and keep up the great work on the platform.
Best regards,
Michael Schuh