Metro
A mosaic built around oversized featured tiles — a gallery with a focal point.
Metro lays your images into a fixed mosaic where some tiles are larger than others and the big ones alternate corners as you scroll. It's the layout to reach for when a set of images has a natural hierarchy and a flat grid would flatten it.
When to use it
- A landing-page gallery that needs visual weight rather than uniformity.
- Category or collection overviews where a few images should lead.
- Anywhere a plain Grid looks monotonous.
Its own settings
Metro has no layout-specific controls. The mosaic is a fixed pattern: a four-column grid whose featured tiles alternate corners, driven entirely by CSS.
That's deliberate, not an oversight — a Columns control and a Featured Image Size control both existed during development and were removed, because the pattern only reads as a mosaic at the proportions it ships with.
So Metro is configured entirely from the shared controls:
| Control | Where |
|---|---|
| Horizontal / Vertical Gap | Layout Settings |
| Order | Order |
| Ajax Pagination | Ajax Pagination |
Shared settings
Metro supports every shared panel — Image & Video Settings, Content Settings (Classic and Overlay both work), Image Click Action, Filter & Search, Motion Effects and Advanced.
Things worth knowing
Position decides prominence, so order matters. Which images land in the featured slots is a function of where they sit in the list. Use the Edit Gallery modal to drag your strongest images into those positions — and check the published page, since that's where the pattern is final.
Random order fights the point. Random reshuffles on each load, so a different image is featured every visit. That's fine for a decorative wall and wrong for a curated one.
Tiles are cropped. Like Grid, Metro fits images into fixed boxes, so expect cropping. Images with the subject near the centre survive it best.
Watch the count. The mosaic repeats in blocks. A gallery whose item count leaves the last block half-finished will look lopsided at the bottom — adding or removing an image usually fixes it.