I'm working on a way to make it super easy to create and share beautiful photo galleries that tell a story. Take your folders with photos and create a web gallery that works great on all devices.
The project has a CLI interface that is free and open-source, but you have to self-host the gallery. We are also building a SaaS app which is basically a managed version of the open-source tool with a visual builder and we take care of the hosting and CDN.
The CSS for this is indeed tricky. I figured out this layout 5 years ago in the v1 and forgot how it works, just took it over as it looks good. The key is that not all rows are exactly the same height. There are small differences that allow photos to fit horizontally.
I also tried the vertical masonry layout, which looks good, but makes no sense if your photos have a chronological order...
I'm working on a open-source tool to create photo galleries from a folder of photos: https://simple.photo. It creates galleries as static sites that are easy to self-host.
I started this out of frustration that there is no good tool I could use to share photos from my travel and of my kids with friends and family. I wanted to have a beautiful web gallery that works on all devices, where I can add rich descriptions and that I could share with a simple link.
Turned out more people wanted this (got 200+ GitHub stars for the V1) so I recently released the V2 and I'm working on it with another dev. Down the road we plan a SaaS offer for people that don't want to fiddle with the CLI and self-host the gallery.
https://haltakov.net