Introduction
Meet Shaped Gallery — what it is, what it does, and how these docs help you publish your first gallery.
Welcome to Shaped Gallery. It's a WordPress plugin for building photo and video galleries out of the media you already have — images and videos in your Media Library, images and videos hosted somewhere else, or YouTube, Vimeo, TikTok and Wistia clips — without writing code.
Here's the mental model in one sentence: you drop one block onto a page, choose your media, and pick a layout — and the block's inspector (the settings sidebar on the right of the editor) controls everything about how it looks and behaves.
One block, not seven
Most gallery plugins give you a block per layout. Shaped Gallery gives you one block whose layout is a setting, so switching a masonry gallery to justified is one click and keeps every image, caption, category and style you already set.
What you can build
Shaped Gallery ships seven layouts, each a different answer to "how should these images sit on the page":
| Layout | In one line |
|---|---|
| Automatic Justified | Rows of even height, widths balanced so each row fills the container exactly. |
| Grid | Equal square tiles in a fixed number of columns. |
| Masonry | Columns of uneven height, packed so no vertical gaps are left. |
| Metro | A mosaic built around oversized featured tiles. |
| Thumbnails | One main image synced to a strip of clickable thumbs. |
| Staggered | Alternating columns offset against each other. |
| Perspective Scrolling | A 3D marquee of scrolling columns, with mouse tilt and parallax. |
Every layout is responsive: columns, spacing and most sizes carry separate desktop, tablet and mobile values.
On top of that you get:
- A lightbox with zoom, pan, pinch, swipe, a thumbnail strip, a slideshow, full-screen and full keyboard operation.
- Watermarking — text or image marks composited into cached copies of your files, so the original URL is never published.
- Category filtering and image search, filtered on the server so the counts always match the grid.
- Ajax pagination — Load More, infinite load, or numbered pages.
- Entrance and hover animations, duotone, and per-image styling.
- Reusable galleries — build once, get a permanent shortcode, embed anywhere.
- Page-builder integrations for Elementor, Divi, WPBakery, Oxygen, Beaver Builder and Bricks.
Why people pick it
- Server-rendered. The gallery's HTML is built in PHP and arrives with the page, rather than being assembled by JavaScript after it loads. That means it's there on first paint, and search engines see real markup.
- Switch layouts without starting over. The layout is a setting, so nothing is locked in.
- Only load what you use. Each big feature is a module you can switch off site-wide. Off means the code isn't just skipped — the bundle isn't requested at all.
- Edit a gallery once, update it everywhere. A page embeds a reference to a saved gallery, never a copy.
Two ways to place a gallery
| The block (recommended) | A saved gallery + shortcode | |
|---|---|---|
| Where you build it | On the page itself | Shaped Gallery → Add New Gallery |
| How visitors see it | The block is the page content | You paste [shaped_gallery id="42"] somewhere |
| Best when | You're in the block editor or Full Site Editing | You use a page builder, or want one gallery in several places |
Both run exactly the same code: the shortcode renders the stored block through the block's own renderer, so a gallery placed with Elementor and the same gallery placed as a block produce byte-identical markup, CSS and behaviour. Start with the block; reach for a saved gallery when you need it in more than one place.
Words you'll see a lot
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Block | A ready-made piece of content you drop onto a page in the WordPress editor. |
| Inspector | The settings sidebar on the right of the editor, visible whenever a block is selected. |
| Layout | Which of the seven arrangements this gallery uses. It's a setting on the block, not a separate block. |
| Module | A big feature you can switch on or off for the whole site, under Shaped Gallery → Settings → Modules. |
| Shortcode | A short piece of text in square brackets, like [shaped_gallery id="42"], that WordPress swaps for real content on the page. |
Anything else unfamiliar is in the Glossary.
How these docs are organized
- Getting Started — requirements, installation and license, a Quick Start, the full gallery block reference, and adding media.
- Layouts — one page per layout. Read the gallery block reference once; it documents every shared inspector panel. Each layout page then covers only what's unique to it.
- Managing Galleries — the Edit Gallery modal, categories, and reusable galleries.
- Features — the lightbox, watermark, filtering, pagination, animations, visibility, plus performance and accessibility.
- Admin Dashboard — the dashboard, saved galleries, and every Settings section.
- Help — the FAQ, Best Practices, Troubleshooting, the Glossary, and what happens when you uninstall.
- Developers — hooks, the shortcode, block attributes, the REST API, and media providers.
Ready to start?
- Check Requirements — there's one that catches people out.
- Install and activate your license.
- Follow the Quick Start and publish something real.
Stuck? The FAQ answers the common questions, and Troubleshooting walks through the things that go wrong, symptom by symptom.