Joomla gallery extension done right: Showtime Image Gallery

Joomla gallery extensions are quite popular and the reason is simple: Almost every site needs a gallery. This blog post is a mini-presentation of our new Joomla Gallery component: Showtime Image Gallery. We will look at the two unique features that Showtime Image Gallery brings into Joomla Galleries.

Joomla Gallery Components And Custom Fields

Joomla 3.7 introduced custom fields opening a whole new era of possibilities for developers and site builders. Showtime Image Gallery is the first Joomla gallery extension to support custom fields. In simple words, this means that you can add infinite galleries to your Joomla articles and each one of them can have its own settings.

This way you have total control of your galleries regarding the rendering position, the access level, and the language. Custom fields give you also the ability to chose where they will be rendered in editing form. You can place the gallery custom field in a separate tab following the pattern that many other popular content extensions are using (K2 for example). Showtime is the only Joomla Gallery with this amazing feature!

Make sure to check the video below for a quick demonstration of Showtime Image Gallery custom fields integration.

Joomla Gallery Components and WYSIWYG Editor Previews

Showtime Image Gallery is also the first Joomla gallery to provide live previews for galleries inserted inside the editor. The preview gives the user a quick overview of the gallery. The preview box also includes edit and remove buttons so you can manage the gallery quickly, directly from the editor.

Previews of the galleries is an important feature that vastly improves the editing experience. It's a feature that's already used in other CMS like WordPress and users really like it. Joomla has all the required plugin events so all extension developers should move from the ugly curly brackets to something more meaningful and helpful for the user. This is something that even the core plugins should do, improving the user experience of Joomla in overall. Let's make our beloved Joomla more user-friendly! Again, Showtime is the only Joomla gallery extension that has this feature!

The following video demonstrates the Showtime Image Gallery editor previews in Joomla Articles.

Features, Features, Features

Last but not least, we want to make a list of all the useful features that you can find in Showtime Image Gallery for Joomla:

• Automatic image resizing during upload. Unlike other crappy extensions that resize the images when the page loads, Showtime does this job in the backend when the gallery is created. This makes sure that your site will not suffer from slow loading times or white screens.
• Fixed (cropped) or natural aspect ratio thumbnails.
• Optional resize of the large images (images used in lightbox).
• Option for converting all images to JPEG format or keep the original image format.
• Option for rendering a module position in the image captions.
• Drag-n-drop reordering of the gallery images.
• Gallery images titles and descriptions.
• Organise your galleries in categories.
• Configurable lightbox scripts. Showtime includes some of the most popular lightbox scripts and all of them are fully configurable. You can change any of the lightbox scripts options by simply editing the corresponding plugin options.
• Render galleries in a module.
• Render galleries in Joomla articles content (or any other extension content that supports content plugins).
• Render galleries in Joomla Custom Fields (supporting any extension that integrates with custom fields).
• Gallery previews in WYSIWYG editors.
• Front-end editing support.
• Asynchronous uploads. All image uploads are performed using AJAX providing a quick, non-blocking user-friendly experience. 
• Chunked uploads. You can upload any image no matter how large it is. Showtime will perform the upload in chunks.
• Google structured data integration. 

Final words

Showtime Image Gallery is the most complete, modern, easy, user-friendly Joomla gallery extension ever made. It comes with some unique features that make it stand out from the competition. If you get this extension we hope that you really enjoy it. If you have any suggestions for improvements or new features please feel free to use our contact form. We would love to hear any thoughts!