Photos and video bring an intranet to life - event galleries, product shots, culture content. SharePoint has an Image gallery web part, but it's fairly plain and stops at pictures. Here's what it does, where it runs out, and how to add a polished gallery that handles video too.
What SharePoint gives you natively
- Image gallery web part - grid, brick or carousel layouts from images you add or from a library.
- A simple full-screen view of a single image.
- File and media web parts for embedding one video at a time.
Where the native options stop
- Limited layouts - no masonry, justified rows, collage or filmstrip.
- Images only - you can't mix video into the same gallery, and there's no proper lightbox with captions.
- Little control over hover styles, spacing or per-item audience targeting.
- Video from Stream or a sharing link needs separate handling and often shows no real thumbnail.
The supported way: an SPFx gallery web part
A SharePoint Framework (SPFx) web part can render a richer, responsive gallery from the same images and libraries. Glow Cloud Kit Showcase offers seven layouts - grid, masonry, justified rows, collage, mosaic, carousel and filmstrip - an accessible lightbox, soft hover styles, and items added by hand or bound live to a document library. Crucially, video just works: Stream and sharing links play inline, large uploads show progress, and every video tile gets a real thumbnail - captured from the video itself when SharePoint hasn't generated one. Per-item and whole-gallery audience targeting are built in.
Linking gallery tiles to pages and documents
A gallery is often a set of shortcuts rather than a photo album - a wall of policy documents, team pages or product sheets. Both sources support a click-through link on each tile.
- Items added by hand - each item carries its own link alongside its caption and alt text.
- Library-bound galleries - name a link column and every tile clicks through to its own destination. Either a SharePoint Hyperlink column or a plain text column holding a URL works, and tiles whose column is empty simply have no link, so you can link some and not others.
By default a linked tile still opens the lightbox, which shows the link so people can look at the image first and follow it if they want. Switch on Item links navigate instead of opening the lightbox and the tile becomes a straight link - which is what you want when the gallery is really a set of visual shortcuts rather than something to look at.
A checklist for a great gallery
- Choose a layout for the content - justified rows for photos, mosaic for a mixed set.
- Add items by hand, or bind to a document library so new files appear automatically.
- Mix in video where it helps - it plays in the same lightbox as the images.
- Check load performance with lazy loading on a page with many items.
- Test the lightbox and captions on mobile.
Related
- Glow Cloud Kit Showcase - the product overview.
- Showcase setup guide - install and configuration steps.
- How to make SharePoint look modern.