Heckgalerie: Galleries for WordPress That Don't Bring 2 MB of JavaScript

Gallery plugins are one of the oldest categories in the WordPress ecosystem, and it shows. The big names in the category drag along image editing, their own page builders, sales modules, and a decade of compatibility layers — and ship all of that on every single page, even where all that's needed is three logos in a row. If you've ever measured why a WordPress site is slow, the gallery is surprisingly often on the list of suspects.

Heckgalerie is our answer to that, and the subtitle says it all: Featherweight Galleries. A gallery plugin that shows images, lines up logos, and runs sliders — and otherwise stays out of the website's way.

What Heckgalerie does

Logo bars, the most common gallery of all

Partners, customers, "as seen in": the logo bar is the gallery almost every business website needs, and yet hardly any plugin has a decent template for it. Heckgalerie ships four: a grid, a single row, framed tiles — and a marquee that scrolls the logos continuously. The marquee pauses on hover, and visitors who have reduced motion set in their system automatically get the calm version instead. You can see it live: the press logos on horstwenzel.com and the logo grid on boeasy.de both run on Heckgalerie.

Galleries, sliders, albums

On top of that come five gallery templates for the classic image gallery, three sliders (soft crossfade, carousel, a large hero stage), and albums that bundle multiple galleries under cover sheets — useful, say, for photographers who want to keep shoots separate. Tags make galleries filterable through topic chips that also work with keyboard and screen readers.

Video without the privacy headache

Videos in galleries are usually a privacy issue, since the standard YouTube embed pings Google the moment the page loads. Heckgalerie does it differently: our server fetches the thumbnail once, when the gallery is saved, and the visitor initially only sees that locally stored image. Only when they explicitly click play does the connection to YouTube get made. Self-hosted videos run with no third party involved at all.

EXIF, with restraint

For photographers, Heckgalerie can display shooting data on request: camera, lens, exposure, aperture. The display works off a fixed allowlist of permitted fields — GPS coordinates and other location data are never output, not even by accident.

The real feature: what's missing

The most important number for Heckgalerie is a budget: all frontend assets combined — stylesheet and JavaScript for every template — stay under 7 KB compressed. For comparison: the JavaScript bundles of common gallery and slider plugins alone routinely run fifty to a hundred times that size. That's possible because Heckgalerie consistently leaves things out: no built-in image editing, no bundled storefront, no page builder. Images are managed by the WordPress media library, which handles that best anyway.

That being lean isn't a trade-off against being careful shows in the engine room: 150 automated tests cover every template, and a dedicated backward-compatibility test guarantees that existing galleries render exactly the same after every update — checked byte-for-byte against the previously shipped version.

For switchers: the import assistant

If you're coming from one of the big gallery plugins, you don't have to rebuild your galleries: Heckgalerie ships with an import assistant that takes over existing NextGEN galleries. The move from "works, but heavy" to "works and is featherweight" is meant to be an afternoon, not a project.

When you'll get it

Honest, shipyard-style answer: Heckgalerie is fully built, runs in production on the two linked websites, and is already served through our update infrastructure. What's still missing is a product page and final pricing — both are in the works, and as always with us, there'll be a clean split: a fully capable free core, paid tiers for special cases. What else is happening in the shipyard in parallel is in the July workshop report.

If you want to use Heckgalerie before the official release — say, because your current gallery plugin is currently wrecking your load times — just reach out. Early users with real feedback are a shipyard's favorite kind of customer.

Frequently asked questions