Squarespace Custom Gallery

Squarespace Gallery Types Explained

Grid Gallery

The Grid Gallery displays images in a uniform grid with equal-sized thumbnails. You control the number of columns, the spacing between images, and whether images crop to a consistent aspect ratio or display at their original proportions. Grid galleries work best for product photography, team member photos, and any content where visual consistency matters.

Masonry Gallery

The Masonry Gallery preserves each image's original aspect ratio and arranges them in a Pinterest-style layout where images stack vertically within columns. This layout works well for mixed-orientation photography (portrait and landscape together) and creates a more organic, editorial feel than the strict grid.

Slideshow Gallery

The Slideshow Gallery displays one image at a time with navigation arrows or autoplay. Use it for hero sections, featured project showcases, or any context where you want visitors to focus on one image at a time. Slideshows support captions, transition effects, and autoplay speed configuration.

Carousel Gallery

The Carousel Gallery shows multiple images in a horizontally scrolling row. Visitors can scroll or swipe through images without leaving the page. Carousels work well for product showcases, client logos, and any content where you want to display many images without taking up vertical space.

Customizing Gallery Layout Settings

Adjusting Columns and Spacing

Click on any gallery block to access its design settings. For Grid and Masonry galleries, you can configure the number of columns (typically one to six) and the gutter width (spacing between images). Fewer columns with larger images create a dramatic portfolio feel. More columns with smaller thumbnails create a compact catalog feel. For design principles that apply to gallery layouts, our Squarespace design tips guide covers visual hierarchy and spacing.

Configuring Lightbox Behavior

The lightbox is the full-screen overlay that appears when a visitor clicks a gallery image. Configure lightbox settings in the gallery block's design panel - you can enable or disable lightbox, choose transition styles, and control whether captions display. For portfolio sites, always enable lightbox so visitors can view images at full resolution.

Image Aspect Ratio and Cropping

Grid galleries offer aspect ratio controls that crop all images to the same shape - square, landscape, portrait, or custom ratios. Consistent cropping creates a cleaner grid but may cut important parts of some images. If your images have varying compositions, use the focal point tool (click the crop icon on each image) to control which part of the image remains visible when cropped.

Advanced Gallery Customization with CSS

Custom Hover Effects

Add hover effects to gallery thumbnails using Custom CSS. You can create opacity changes, zoom effects, color overlays, or caption reveals on hover. For example, to add a zoom effect on hover:

.gallery-grid .gallery-grid-item img { transition: transform 0.3s ease; } .gallery-grid .gallery-grid-item:hover img { transform: scale(1.05); }

Custom Grid Spacing and Borders

Override the default gutter width with CSS for precise spacing control. Add borders or box shadows to gallery items for a framed look. Target the gallery container with its section ID for page-specific styling that does not affect galleries on other pages. For a complete CSS walkthrough, our guide to adding custom CSS to Squarespace covers selectors and responsive techniques.

Hiding Gallery Metadata

If your gallery displays titles, descriptions, or other metadata that you want to hide, use CSS display: none on the metadata elements. This gives you a clean, image-only gallery without needing to delete the metadata from each image (which you may want to keep for SEO purposes).

Building Custom Galleries with Code Blocks

For gallery layouts that Squarespace's built-in blocks cannot produce - like a filterable gallery, a before-and-after slider, or a gallery with custom overlay content - use Code Blocks with custom HTML and CSS.

Create your gallery HTML structure with image tags, links, and overlay divs, then style everything with Custom CSS. This approach gives you unlimited layout control but requires managing your own images and HTML rather than using Squarespace's gallery editor. For code implementation, our guide to adding custom code to Squarespace covers Code Block setup and styling.

Gallery Optimization Best Practices

Compress images before uploading. Gallery pages are image-heavy by nature. Compress every image to under 500 KB using TinyPNG or Squoosh before uploading. This dramatically improves load time without visible quality loss.

Use consistent image dimensions. For Grid galleries, upload images at the same aspect ratio. This prevents awkward cropping and creates a professional, cohesive grid. Even Masonry galleries look better when images follow a limited set of aspect ratios rather than random sizes.

Add alt text to every image. Alt text improves accessibility for screen readers and helps search engines understand your gallery content. Describe each image specifically - "sunset over Brooklyn Bridge" is better than "photo1." For SEO optimization of visual content, our Squarespace SEO guide covers image SEO best practices.

Test gallery performance on mobile. Galleries with many images can load slowly on mobile devices. Check your gallery pages on an actual phone and reduce the number of images or increase compression if load time exceeds three seconds. For mobile optimization, our guide to customizing your Squarespace website covers responsive design strategies.

Build a Gallery That Showcases Your Work

A well-customized Squarespace gallery does more than display images - it creates an experience that keeps visitors engaged and positions your visual content as professional, intentional, and worth exploring. Start with the right gallery type for your content, configure the built-in settings, and use Custom CSS for the finishing touches that make your gallery yours.

Optimize your images, test on mobile, and keep the layout focused on the content rather than the design. The best galleries are the ones where visitors notice the images, not the gallery structure.