novaGallery

novaGallery is a beautiful php image gallery with the focus on your images, trimmed for ease of use and low demands on web space. You just need a webserver with PHP 8.X support. No database is required. Simple to use, easy customizable and beautiful.

Official Product Page: novaGallery.org

Features

Overview

• Albums: Directories are rendered as albums
• Sub-Albums: Can be used for more detailed organisation
• Preview images for albums: Automatically generate an album preview image
• Photo overview: All photos are displayed sorted by creation date or name
• Lightbox: View your photos in large format, hiding everything that is distracting
• Slideshow: All photos in an album, can be displayed and presented via click (or keyboard) in the lightbox view
• Use your own upload method: Simply upload the photos into the gallery folder (e.g. via FTP) and the photos are already online
• Thumbnails: Automatic generation of thumbnails
• File compression: Photos with high file size, are automatically compressed with very little loss.
• Supported Images: JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP are supported.
• Custom Themes: With just a little knowledge of CSS and HTML, the look can be customized.
• Languages: You can run the gallery in your langauage
• Addons: Addons allow you to extend the features of novaGallery:
  • Private Mode: You can set a password to protect your gallery from public access.
  • Robots Meta Tag: Set the visibility of your content for bots
  • Pro Version: Changes your novaGallery to novaGallery Pro and removes contributions
  • more addons coming soon

Screenshots

Demo

• novaGallery Demo

Requirements

• Apache web server or similar
• Apache: enabled mod_rewrite and .htaccess support
• Other webserver (e.g. nginx): Individual settings in config to route all requests throw index.php
• PHP 8.x
• PHP-GD Extension
• PHP Exif Support

Setup

Installation

• Download latest version: Download novaGallery (latest version)
• Unzip files
• Upload files to your webspace
• Copy config/site.example.php to config/site.php
• Edit the config in config/site.php
  • Set URL to novaGallery including http or https
• Upload your photos into galleries
• Enjoy your new photo gallery

Configuration

• Every folder in galleries is a gallery
• In config/site.php you can change some basic informations, image sizes and other settings
• That's it :-)

Configuration for Installation in Subdir

• Set RewriteBase in .htaccess: RewriteBase /subdir/ (Be sure, that you set the URL path, without the domain and with starting and trailing slash)
• Set url in config/site.php with full subdir path

Manage Images

• Add Photos: Just upload the new photo to the server into the correct album (e.g via FTP)
• Delete a Photos: Just delete the photo at the server. To save web space it's recommended to delete the cached files in cache folder also.
• Delete an Album: Just delete the whole album (directory) at the server. To save web space it's recommended to delete the cached files in cache folder also.
• Reset Cache: Each gallery has its own folder in the cache directory (default: YOUR_PATH/storage/cache), identical to the path in the gallery folder. Simply delete the corresponding gallery folder in the cache directory.

Themes

• Two basic themes are included: novagallery (default, dark) and novagallery-light
• To change the theme, just change the theme name in config/site.php
• Creating a new template is quite simple and works with basic PHP without any extra template engine.
• To create a new template, the basic template (based on Bootstrap 5) can be duplicated, customized and activated in the settings.

Languages

• Some languages are already added (English, German, Spanisch, French, Finnish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese)
• Set your language in config/site.php
• You can create easily your own language. Just copy one of the language files, translate it and save it with your language code
• It would be nice, if you let us know if you created a new language file. Just send us a message or create a pull request.

Addons

• novaGallery 2 can be extended with addons
• The addon feature is experimental. The functionality including hooks and configuration may still change completely.
• To activate the addons feature, just copy config/addons.example.php to config/addons.php
• Upload your addon to the addons-directory
• Add the config of the addons config-file (config/addons.php) and activate it:

  "The Addon Name": {
    "enabled": true
  }

• Be careful, the file must contain valid JSON so that the addons config can be loaded

Private Mode

• In novaGallery 2, the private mode is build as addon. This is included as basic addon.
• To activate it, make sure that the Addons functionality is generally activated
• In config/addons.php you can set a PHP password hash:

"Password Protection": {
    "enabled": false,
    "passwordHash": "HERE-YOUR-PASSWORD-HASH"
  },

• The password hash has to be created with the standard PHP function password_hash()
• If you can't generate a password hash by your own, you can use our password hash generator: Password Hash Generator

Nice to Know

• Supported images: JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP (experimental)
• At the first time an album is opened, the thumbnails are generated. This may take a little time. After that the cached images are used for each visit.
• If you don't use an apache2 web server with .htaccess support (e.g. nginx), you have to set the required rewrite rules from the .htaccess file at the webserver config.
• WebP-Support is experimantal. The basics PHP-GD-Lib currently doesn't support generating thumbnails from WebP-images without additional software on the webserver.
• The thumbnail of animated GIFs is without animation. The animation is available in the lightbox view.

Troubleshooting

• Error 404 when clicking on an album or image:
  • On Apache: mod_rewrite is not installed and/or enabled
  • On Apache: htacces support is not enabled
  • On nginx or other webserver: settings in server config to route all requests throw index.php is not enabled (similar mod_rewrite)
  • novaGallery is installed in sub dir, but RewriteBase in .htaccess is not set (or similar on other webserver)
• If thumbnails and images are not generated, in most cases it's one of the following problems:
  • On Apache: mod_rewrite is not installed and/or enabled
  • On Apache: htacces support is not enabled
  • On nginx or other webserver: settings in server config to route all requests throw index.php is not enabled (similar mod_rewrite)
  • PHP GD-Lib is not installed or/and activated

Configuration Details

All settings

Setting Name	Description	Example
siteName	Name of the gallery	novaGallery
siteTitle	Title of the gallery, e.g. shown in the browser tab	The Simple PHP Image Gallery
metaTitle	Title used for meta tags (SEO purposes)	novaGallery
metaDescription	Description used for meta tags (SEO purposes)	novaGallery - beautiful php photo gallery...
footerText	HTML content for the footer area	© 2025 by novafacile OÜ
theme	Name of the theme to be used	novagallery
url	Base URL of the gallery	https://demo.novagallery.org
language	Language code (ISO 639-1)	en
imagesDirName	Directory name containing the image albums	galleries
storageDirName	Directory name used for cached/generated files	storage
imageCache	Enables or disables image caching (true, false)	true
cacheFileListMaxAge	Maximum age (in seconds) of cached file lists	60
imageSizes.thumbnail	Size of the thumbnail images (width x height, or largest side)	400x400
imageSizes.large	Maximum width for the large image version (width x height, or largest side)	2000
imageQuality	JPEG quality for generated images (1–100)	85
useOriginalForLarge	Use original image for large version instead of a resized one (true, false)	false
useExifDate	Use EXIF date for sorting (true, false)	true
sortAlbums	Sort order of albums (nameASC, dateDESC, nameASC, nameDESC, random)	dateDESC
sortImages	Sort order of images within an album (nameASC, dateDESC, nameASC, nameDESC, random)	dateDESC
albumTitle.enabled	Enables or disables transformation of album titles (true, false)	true
albumTitle.transformation	Transformation applied to album titles (ucwords, ucfirst, uppercase, lowercase)	ucwords
albumTitle.replace	Characters to be replaced in album titles	{ "_": " ", "-": " ", "/": " » " }
imageCaption.enabled	Enables or disables image captions	false
imageCaption.transformation	Transformation applied to image captions	ucwords
imageCaption.replace	Characters to be replaced in image captions	{ "_": " ", "-": " " }
imageCaption.showInAlbum	Show image captions in album view	false
imageCaption.showInLightbox	Show image captions in lightbox view	true

Sorting Images and Albums

Albums and Images can be sorted with the following settings:

Setting	Descripton
dateASC	Oldest first - Sorted by exif capture date. If exif data is not available, it uses the last filetime
dateDESC	Newest first - Sorted by exif capture date. If exif data is not available, it uses the last filetime
nameASC	alphabetical ascending
nameDESC	alphabetical descending
random	radmon order with every request

Captions

For albums and images captions can be shown. For this the file name is used without the file extension. It's possible to transform file names for the caption. For images you can set if caption is shown in album or lightbox or both.

Setting	possible settings
transformation	ucwords, ucfirst, uppercase, lowercase
replace	every replacemt has to be an own entry (e.g. "_": " " means replace underscore in filename with whitespace).

Support

• For support just open a ticket: novaGallery Support

Support Development: Pro Version without contribution

• To support the development you can buy the Pro version for only $15. This contains exactly the same features as the free version but the mention of "powerd by novaGallery" in the footer is no longer required. In addition, every Pro Version user has the possibility to receive personal support via email.
• Get the Pro Version: Buy novaGallery Pro Version

Contribution

We are open to ideas, improvements and bug fixes. Just create a pull request with your improvements and optimizations. If everything is okay and it fits to our product vision, we will be pleased to merge it.

Upgrade from v1

novaGallery 2 is a complete rewrite and works fundamentally differently than novaGallery v1. The upgrade requires a few manual steps, but enables an interrupt-free upgrade.

1. prepare and customize the new config file locally before uploading
2. prepare and customize the new .htacces locally before uploading
3. upload new files completely
4. ensure that the WebServer has write permissions in the storage folder
5. delete all folders beginning with nova-.
6. delete the folder cache and the file filesCache.php in the gallery folder in each album

Please note that this only works if you have not made any individual modifications.

Alternative option:

1. upload the new version separately
2. Customize the configuration
3. Re-upload or copy photos/albums (delete the old cache folders & files after copying)
4. Switch to the new version

Developer

Addon Hooks

This is a list of the available hooks. Please note that the addons functionality is still under development and experimental and therefore not all hooks are fully functional yet. The functionality including hooks and configuration may still change completely.

Hook Name	Description	Status
beforeAll	Triggered before loading all routes	testing
afterAll	Triggered after all routes have been processed	testing
beforeRouting	Triggered before the routing process starts	testing
afterRouting	Triggered after the routing process ends	testing
beforePage	Triggered before rendering a page	testing
afterPage	Triggered after a page has been rendered	testing
beforeImage	Triggered before an image is processed or displayed	development
afterImage	Triggered after an image has been processed or displayed	development
beforeTheme	Triggered before the theme is initialized	testing
beforeLoadGallery	Triggered before the gallery content is loaded	development
afterLoadGallery	Triggered after the gallery content has been loaded	development
templateHead	Triggered after the <head> section of the HTML template	testing
templateBodyBegin	Triggered after the <body> tag	testing
templateNavigationBegin	Triggered before rendering the navigation section begins	testing
templateNavigationEnd	Triggered after the navigation section ends	testing
templateBeforePageTitle	Triggered before the page title is rendered	testing
templateAfterPageTitle	Triggered after the page title is rendered	testing
templateBeforeAlbumList	Triggered before the album list is rendered	development
templateAfterAlbumList	Triggered after the album list is rendered	development
templateBeforeAlbum	Triggered before a single album block is rendered	development
templateAfterAlbum	Triggered after a single album block is rendered	development
templateBeforeAlbumCover	Triggered before the album cover image is rendered	development
templateAfterAlbumCover	Triggered after the album cover image is rendered	development
templateBeforeImageList	Triggered before the list of images is rendered	testing
templateAfterImageList	Triggered after the list of images is rendered	testing
templateBeforeImage	Triggered before a single image block is rendered	development
templateAfterImage	Triggered after a single image block is rendered	development
templateBeforeImageCover	Triggered before the main image cover is rendered	development
templateAfterImageCover	Triggered after the main image cover is rendered	development
templateBodyEnd	Triggered before the closing </body> tag	testing

Used Packages

We are very grateful to the creators of the following great packages that we use for novaGallery:

• SteamPixelPHPRouter
• SimpleImage
• Bootstrap
• SimpleLightbox
• Some concepts are inspired by the wonderful flat file CMS Bludit

Copyright & License

• All rights reserved by novafacile OÜ
• License: GNU Affero General Public License (A-GPL 3.0)
• To remove all public copyright & "powered by" mentions, you can purchase a life time license on novagallery.org for only 15,00 €.