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 they 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. The version in the WordPress.org directory ships two: a logo grid and a single row. The Pro version, which is not currently on sale, adds cards with names and a marquee that scrolls the logos continuously. The marquee pauses on hover and stands still for visitors who have reduced motion set in their system. You can see it live: the press logos on horstwenzel.com (as a marquee) and the logo grid on boeasy.de both run on Heckgalerie.

The 55-second short builds such a row: logos from the media library, grey until a visitor points at one, one shortcode on the page. The two free logo bar templates, grid and single row, are plain CSS, and Heckgalerie only loads its script on pages that contain a slider or a lightbox.

Video: A logo wall without a slider plugin55 seconds · YouTube Short · loads only after a click

Galleries, sliders, albums

For the classic image gallery there are grid, masonry and justified, plus a slider with a soft crossfade and albums that bundle multiple galleries under cover sheets, which is useful for photographers who want to keep shoots separate. One click on an album tile opens the gallery on the same page, with no subpages and no JavaScript. The lightbox comes with every template. Mosaic and filmstrip, the carousel and the large hero stage, and the filter bar with topic chips belong to the Pro version.

Video without the privacy headache (Pro)

Video tiles exist only in the Pro version. The version in the WordPress.org directory shows no videos. Videos in galleries are usually a privacy issue, since the standard YouTube embed pings Google the moment the page loads. The Pro version does it differently: your website's server fetches the thumbnail once, when the gallery is saved, and stores it in the media library, so the visitor initially only sees that local image. Only their click on the tile opens the connection to YouTube. Self-hosted videos from the media library run with no third party involved at all.

EXIF, with restraint

For photographers, Heckgalerie can show a line of capture data in the lightbox: camera, aperture, exposure time, ISO, focal length and capture date. It is off by default. The display reads exactly these six fields, so it cannot output GPS coordinates or other location data, not even by accident. Heckgalerie also strips EXIF and GPS data from the web-sized versions of your images, while the uploaded original stays untouched.

The real feature: what's missing

The most important number for Heckgalerie is a budget: according to the directory listing, all frontend files combined (stylesheet and JavaScript) stay under 15 KB gzipped. Heckgalerie only enqueues JavaScript on pages with a slider or lightbox, grids and logo bars get by with plain CSS, and pages without a gallery load none of it. 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 wrecking your load times), just reach out. Early users with real feedback are a shipyard's favorite kind of customer.

Frequently asked questions