Endless Photo Display Story
!Friendica Support Photo handling is still a nag! I put 5 photos with portrait orientation into a post. I got a quite ugly vertical array. Why can we not have a nice preview gallery like Diaspora has? We already have a nice gallery when we expand one of the pictures. I would like to see at least two photos per line like Mastodon does. I know Mastodon only allowes 4 photos per post as they cannot count to 5.
I will not care in future because normally I upload a photo montage if I upload photos at all. I don't like much to upload photos. Excuse me for that. 🤕
Random Penguin
•I'm working on addressing this for the next release. There are some strange conditions that will prevent it Friendica from showing a gallery that I have not figured out how to address:
1. Do not put ANY text *after* your photos.
2. Do not put any text *between* your photos.
3. Do not put any line-breaks/carriage returns between your photos.
It pretty much has to be an uninterrupted set of photos with no spaces or anything between them. Or it will break the gallery layout. It happens so often for people that I'm also doing a workaround to sort-of gallery the images anyway, even Friendica won't put it in a gallery.
I'm also working on making the post preview show you your images as a gallery too. Right now it only shows them full-width one after the other. So you have no way of knowing if you've done something to "break" the gallery layout or not until you've already posted it.
Here's the GitHub thread about it:
https://github.com/friendica/friendica/issues/16009
I'm still trying to get my PR together for this. I'm also adding functional ALT tags to images and previews in the post composer.
VegOS
•VegOS
•@Random Penguin I edited my post without 1 to 3. Now it looks fine: https://friendica.opensocial.space/display/8ffdf77c-856a-7506-1c54-36e863312980
VegOS
2026-08-06 22:09:32
VegOS
•Random Penguin
•There isn't any setting for default dimensions but server admins can set the file upload size limit, that will be what determines how large an image you can try to upload (if it's extremely large the server might still time out before it finishes uploading). Server admins can also change how Friendica stores uploaded images. The default is to store them in the database, but that can quickly make the database grow, so there are other options. However, none of this is in the hands of the user.
You can also place external images in your posts, assuming the site you're pulling them from allows hotlinking. Friendica will try to generate a local preview image for it (though I've personally found this very hit-or-miss).
The masonry layout works with images that have different aspect ratios. The aspect ratios and the order you put them in your post have more to do with the layout than anything else. If they're all the same size and aspect ratio they'll likely layout in a grid naturally.
As for the actual "grid" layout in Friendica, we're still trying to determine if it
... show moreThere isn't any setting for default dimensions but server admins can set the file upload size limit, that will be what determines how large an image you can try to upload (if it's extremely large the server might still time out before it finishes uploading). Server admins can also change how Friendica stores uploaded images. The default is to store them in the database, but that can quickly make the database grow, so there are other options. However, none of this is in the hands of the user.
You can also place external images in your posts, assuming the site you're pulling them from allows hotlinking. Friendica will try to generate a local preview image for it (though I've personally found this very hit-or-miss).
The masonry layout works with images that have different aspect ratios. The aspect ratios and the order you put them in your post have more to do with the layout than anything else. If they're all the same size and aspect ratio they'll likely layout in a grid naturally.
As for the actual "grid" layout in Friendica, we're still trying to determine if it every actually gets used. It's only used if Friendica can't get the image dimensions, but it's unclear if/when that ever happens.