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How to add a photo gallery to a Shopify store (no code)

5 min read · Updated September 27, 2026

Add a masonry, grid or carousel photo gallery to any Shopify page from the theme editor in five minutes, with no Liquid edits and nothing left behind.

Shopify themes ship with an image banner and a collage section, but not a real gallery: no lightbox, no masonry, no tag filtering, and every image has to be placed by hand. This guide shows how to add a gallery to any page of an Online Store 2.0 theme (Dawn, Sense, Craft, Refresh and most paid themes) using an app block, so you never touch theme code.

What you need

An Online Store 2.0 theme (anything released since 2021; the theme editor shows an Apps category when you add a section or block) and the photos you want to show. JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF and AVIF up to 20 MB each work; MP4, MOV and WebM videos up to 250 MB do too.

Themes with the Canvas badge can't use app blocks yet; use your original theme without the badge or a copy of it made with Duplicate (not Duplicate in Canvas) on Online Store > Themes.

Snug Gallery's free plan covers one gallery of up to 25 images with every layout and the lightbox, so you can complete this guide without paying anything.

Step 1: install the app and create a gallery

  1. Install Snug Gallery from the Shopify App Store. It asks for permission to write files (to store your photos in your shop) and read products (for shop-the-look pins).
  2. Open the app from Apps in your admin and click New gallery. Give it a name such as “Spring shoot” and pick a layout: Masonry keeps each photo's proportions, Grid crops everything to one aspect ratio, Carousel scrolls horizontally.
  3. Upload your images (paid plans can also import them from existing products or from Shopify Files). Drag to reorder. Click any image to add alt text, a caption, a link and tags.

Step 2: place the gallery from the theme editor

  1. In the app, click Add to theme (or go to Online Store > Themes > Customize). Open the page where the gallery should appear.
  2. Click Add section (or Add block inside an existing section), open the Apps tab and choose Gallery from Snug Gallery.
  3. In the block settings, select the gallery you created. Set columns for desktop, tablet and phone, spacing, image shape, captions, hover effect and whether images open in a lightbox. The preview updates live.
  4. Click Save. The gallery is now on your storefront.

Step 3: check speed and accessibility

Because the gallery is rendered by a theme app extension, images are served from Shopify's CDN at the right size for each screen, exactly like your product photos. Run your page through PageSpeed Insights before and after: the gallery should not change your Largest Contentful Paint noticeably, and there is no third-party script waiting on another company's server.

Write alt text for every image in the gallery editor. Screen readers use it, and Google Images indexes it. Describe what is in the photo (“linen apron in sage green on a wooden counter”), not the file name.

Common questions

Can I put the same gallery on several pages? Yes, and one page can hold several gallery blocks, each with its own layout settings.

What happens if I uninstall the app? The block disappears from your pages and nothing is left behind in your theme. Your photos remain in Shopify Files, because they were uploaded to your own store.

Can shoppers filter photos? Add tags to images in the editor and turn on the Tag filter bar in the block settings. Visitors get pill buttons that filter the gallery without a page reload.

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