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 ve