Automatic Justified
Rows of even height with balanced widths, so every row fills the container exactly — the classic photographer's gallery.
Automatic Justified is the layout the block opens on, and the best default for a set of photos that mix portrait and landscape. It fills each row edge to edge by scaling images to a shared height and letting their widths fall where they may — so nothing is cropped and there are no ragged gaps.
When to use it
- A photography portfolio, a shoot, an event album.
- Any set where the images have different proportions and you don't want to crop them.
- Galleries where "no awkward gaps" matters more than "every tile is the same size".
Reach for Grid instead if your images are already uniform, or Masonry if you'd rather have even columns than even rows.
Its own settings
In Layout Settings, Justified adds two controls above the shared ones:
| Control | What it does | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Maximum Row Height | Auto lets the layout pick a row height that balances the row. Custom reveals the slider below. | Auto |
| Row Height (px) | (Custom only) The target height for every row, 80–600. | 280 |
That's the whole layout-specific set. Everything else — spacing, order, pagination, media, content, click action — is shared and documented in the gallery block reference.
Auto vs Custom
Auto adapts: on a narrow screen rows get shorter, so you still get several images per row instead of one enormous one. It's the right choice almost always.
Custom pins the height. Use it when the gallery has to match a fixed band in your design, or when you want two galleries on the same page to line up. The trade is that a narrow viewport can end up with one image per row.
The last row
Justified balances each complete row. The final row often has fewer images, so it can't fill the width the same way — that's expected, not a bug. If it bothers you, adding or removing one image is usually enough to change where the rows break.
Shared settings
| Control | Where it's documented |
|---|---|
| Horizontal / Vertical Gap | Layout Settings → shared controls |
| Order (Default / Random) | Order |
| Ajax Pagination switch | Ajax Pagination |
| Image & Video Settings | Reference |
| Content Settings | Reference |
| Image Click Action | Reference |
| Image Filter & Search | Reference |
| Motion Effects | Reference |
| Advanced Settings | Reference |
Justified supports every panel — it's the most fully-featured of the seven.
Titles and descriptions
Both Classic (text under the image) and Overlay (text on the image) work here. Classic is safe on Justified because the layout's contract is about widths — adding a caption below the image doesn't change how wide the tile is, and the row equalises itself around the tallest caption.
Things worth knowing
It measures your images. Justified needs each image's real proportions to balance a row, so it reads them from the page and lays out from there. That's why it reflows when you resize the window, and why it settles a moment after a page loads rather than being final on first paint.
Gaps count. The row height and the horizontal gap trade against each other — a wide gap on a narrow screen leaves less room for images, so rows get shorter. If a mobile gallery looks cramped, drop the gap for mobile before you touch the row height.
Very wide or very tall images. A panorama in a justified row will dominate it. If one image keeps swallowing a row, either give it a row of its own by reordering, or switch that gallery to Masonry, which handles extreme aspect ratios more gracefully.