I rebuilt a Joomla image gallery I used for years (because nothing replaced it)

Years ago, I relied heavily on an extension called JoomlaWorks Simple Image Gallery. It was one of those rare tools that just worked: simple fast reusable no unnecessary complexity The best part? 👉 You just pointed it to a folder with images — and the gallery was ready. No manual selection. No configuration hell. The problem Over time, that extension was abandoned. And surprisingly, I couldn’t find a modern alternative that offered the same workflow: most galleries were tied to page builders many were too heavy others required manual image selection every time For real-world projects, especially when you work with multiple websites, this becomes inefficient very quickly. The idea: bring back simplicity (but modernized) So I decided to build my own solution. Not a complex gallery system. 👉 Just something practical that works in real projects. The core idea stayed the same: provide a folder → generate a gallery automatically Folder-based approach (why it matters) Instead of selecting ima