Snug Gallery plans: what the limits mean in practice

Pricing pages are written to be short, and shortness hides the questions you actually have. Does a gallery I deleted count? What happens on image 26? If I downgrade, do my galleries break on the storefront? This guide goes through Snug Gallery's three plans the long way, naming what is gated, what is not, and exactly what the app does when you reach a limit, so you can pick a plan from facts rather than from a feature grid.

The three plans in one paragraph each

**Free** gives you one gallery with up to 25 images or videos. You get all nine layouts, from masonry and grid to portfolio and lookbook, the lightbox, captions, tags, video and hover effects. The only visible difference on the storefront is a small “Powered by Snug Gallery” link under the gallery.

**Standard** is $4.99 a month. The limits rise to 10 galleries with up to 1,000 items each, the branding link disappears, and a group of features switches on: links on images, the Pinterest save button, the right-click guard, importing from your products and from Shopify Files, and the customer photo submission form with its moderation queue.

**Unlimited** is $9.99 a month. Galleries are unlimited (each still holds up to 1,000 items), everything in Standard is included, and two things are added: shop the look product pins and priority support.

Notice what is not in that list. Layouts are never gated. The lightbox is never gated. Custom CSS, sort order, autoplay settings and the article template block work the same on every plan. The free plan is the full renderer with a small cap on volume and a credit line, not a demo.

What counts as a gallery

A gallery is a record in the app with a name, a layout and a list of items. The count is of galleries that exist, not of galleries placed in your theme. One gallery placed on five pages is one gallery. Five galleries, each placed nowhere, are five galleries. A deleted gallery is gone and frees its slot immediately.

This matters for the free plan more than the others. If you want a gallery for the homepage and a different one for an about page, that is two galleries and the free plan allows one. The common workaround is a single gallery with tags, filtered per page with a tag in the block settings or the URL. It is a real workaround, not a trick: one gallery of 25 images with three tags can serve three pages with different subsets.

What happens on image 26

Nothing dramatic. The upload simply stops at the cap. When you drop more files than you have room for, the editor tells you how many it will take with a message along the lines of “The Free plan allows 25 images per gallery. You can add 3 more.” The first three upload, the rest are not sent. Nothing is half uploaded and nothing already in the gallery is touched.

The same check runs for every way of adding items: uploading from your computer, importing from a URL, and, on paid plans, importing from products or Shopify Files. The importer shows the remaining room before you confirm, so you can tick 40 product photos and it will tell you up front that only 12 fit.

Videos and images share the same count. A 25 item free gallery can be 25 photos, or 20 photos and 5 videos. The item cap on paid plans is 1,000 per gallery, which in practice is a performance ceiling more than a commercial one; a page with a thousand images is already a lazy loading and Core Web Vitals exercise.

Reaching the gallery limit

When you have as many galleries as your plan allows, the New gallery button is replaced by a banner on the app home page saying you have reached the plan limit and offering the upgrade. The banner also says the part people worry about: existing galleries keep working. The cap stops you creating the eleventh gallery; it never disables the ten you have.

How the app knows your plan

Billing goes through Shopify, so the app does not keep its own record of who paid. Each time it needs your plan it asks Shopify, first through the Partner API entitlement and, if that lookup fails, through the store's active subscriptions. If both are unavailable for a moment it falls back to the last plan it saw, which it stores on the shop as a metafield, and only after that does it assume Free. The answer is cached for 60 seconds, so a brand new upgrade can take up to a minute to be reflected in the editor.

The storefront is simpler. The theme block reads the same metafield when the page renders and uses it to decide two things: whether to print the branding link and whether to draw product pins. If the metafield is missing, the block behaves as Free. This is why a store that has just installed the app shows the credit line until the first plan check has run, which happens the first time you open the app.

Upgrading: what changes immediately

After Shopify confirms the charge and the cache refreshes, the branding link stops rendering, the paid controls appear in the editor (link fields on images, the Pinterest and right-click toggles, the import sources, the submissions section), and the gallery and item caps move to the new plan. Nothing needs re-saving in the theme editor. Galleries you built on Free keep their layout, order and captions and simply gain room.

On Unlimited the pin editor appears on each image. Pins placed on a gallery are stored with the image, and the storefront draws them only when the plan allows, which is the detail behind the next section.

Downgrading: what keeps working and what pauses

Shopify lets you cancel or change the subscription at any time, and the app has to make sense of a store that now exceeds its limits. The rule it follows is: never destroy content, never break a page, just stop the gated features from rendering.

Galleries above the new cap stay in the app and stay on your pages; you cannot create more until you are back under the cap. Images above the new per-gallery cap stay too; you cannot add more to that gallery. Image links stop being followed, the Pinterest button and right-click guard stop rendering, the submission form disappears from the storefront while the photos already approved stay in the gallery, and the branding link returns. Product pins stop drawing on Standard and Free, but the pin positions are kept, so going back to Unlimited brings them back as they were.

Nothing is deleted on a downgrade or on cancellation. If you uninstall the app entirely the theme block is removed with it and Shopify ends the charge; see what happens to app charges after uninstall for the billing side.

Choosing between Standard and Unlimited

The honest split is simple. If you need more than ten galleries, you need Unlimited. If you want shop the look pins, you need Unlimited. Everything else, including customer photos, imports and a thousand items per gallery, is in Standard. Most stores land on Standard; stores running a lookbook with product pins, or building one gallery per collection across a large catalogue, go up a tier.

Development stores are exempt from charges on both paid plans, so you can test the whole feature set on a dev store before deciding. Snug Gallery is on the Shopify App Store and the free plan has no time limit, which is the other way to decide: build the one gallery you need and upgrade the day the second one comes along.

Frequently asked questions

Does a video count as an image toward the 25 item limit?

Yes. Images and videos are both items in a gallery and share the same cap: 25 on Free and 1,000 per gallery on Standard and Unlimited.

If I downgrade from Standard to Free with five galleries, do they disappear?

No. All five stay in the app and keep rendering on your pages. You cannot create a sixth, the branding link comes back, and Standard-only features such as image links and the Pinterest button stop rendering until you upgrade again.

Why does the branding link still show right after I upgraded?

The plan is read from Shopify and cached for about a minute. Open the app once after upgrading and reload the storefront page; the link should be gone within a minute.

Is there a per-store image total, or only a per-gallery cap?

Only a per-gallery cap. Standard allows ten galleries of up to 1,000 items each, and Unlimited allows any number of galleries at the same per-gallery cap.