React Photo Album

React Photo Album is a responsive photo gallery component for React. React Photo Album supports rows, columns, and masonry layouts. Inspired by react-photo-gallery, re-engineered from the ground up.

Overview

Built for React: works with React 18, 17 and 16.8.0+
SSR friendly: produces server-side rendered markup that looks pixel perfect on the client even before hydration
Responsive images: responsive images with automatic resolution switching are supported out of the box
Feature packed: supports 3 layout options (rows, columns and masonry), responsive images, custom data attributes and is fully configurable and customizable
TypeScript: type definitions come built-in in the package
Performance: it was built with performance in mind in order to support large photo albums and silky smooth layout adjustments

Layouts

Rows

React Photo Album | Rows Layout

Columns

React Photo Album | Columns Layout

Masonry

React Photo Album | Masonry Layout

Documentation

https://react-photo-album.com/documentation

Examples

https://react-photo-album.com/examples

Changelog

https://github.com/igordanchenko/react-photo-album/releases

Installation

npm install react-photo-album

Minimal Setup Example

import PhotoAlbum from "react-photo-album";

const photos = [
  { src: "/images/image1.jpg", width: 800, height: 600 },
  { src: "/images/image2.jpg", width: 1600, height: 900 },
];

export default function Gallery() {
  return <PhotoAlbum layout="rows" photos={photos} />;
}

How It Works

Rows Layout

Rows layout fills the rectangular container space by arranging photos into rows that are similar in size, with the height of each row being as close to the targetRowHeight as possible. This layout uses an algorithm adapted from the Knuth and Plass line breaking algorithm. To calculate the single best layout, it uses Dijkstra's algorithm to find the shortest past in a graph where each photo to break on represents a node, and each row represents an edge. The cost of each edge is calculated as the squared deviation from the targetRowHeight. This algorithm produces rows that are similar in height and photos that are not being stretched or shrunken abnormally (as is what happens in a naive implementation). It solves the issue of panoramas shrinking rows or having stragglers or stretched images in the last row, instead creating a justified grid. The graph is being built as the shortest path is being calculated to improve algorithm's performance, so the entire adjacency list is not calculated ahead of time.

Columns Layout

Columns layout fills the rectangular container space by arranging photos into a predefined number of columns, determined by the columns parameter. This layout uses an algorithm very similar to the one described above, but instead of Dijkstra's algorithm, it uses a dynamic programming algorithm to find the shortest path of length N in a directed weighted graph.

Masonry Layout

Masonry layout arranges photos into columns of equal width by placing each photo into the shortest column. This layout does not completely fill the rectangular container space, but the columns end up being as close in height to each other as possible.

Responsive Images

React Photo Album automatically generates sizes and srcset image attributes. In the case of SSR, React Photo Album includes sizes and srcset image attributes in the server-rendered markup, allowing browsers to pick images of the most appropriate resolution depending on their viewport size. To enable images with automatic resolution switching, simply provide smaller images in the photo srcSet attribute.

import PhotoAlbum from "react-photo-album";

const photos = [
  {
    src: "/images/image1_800x600.jpg",
    width: 800,
    height: 600,
    srcSet: [
      { src: "/images/image1_400x300.jpg", width: 400, height: 300 },
      { src: "/images/image1_200x150.jpg", width: 200, height: 150 },
    ],
  },
  {
    src: "/images/image2_1600x900.jpg",
    width: 1600,
    height: 900,
    srcSet: [
      { src: "/images/image2_800x450.jpg", width: 800, height: 450 },
      { src: "/images/image2_400x225.jpg", width: 400, height: 225 },
    ],
  },
];

export default function Gallery() {
  return <PhotoAlbum layout="rows" photos={photos} />;
}

SSR

React Photo Album extensively uses CSS flexbox and CSS calc function to calculate the dimensions of images on the client. Unlike its predecessor, React Photo Album avoids setting the exact dimensions of images in pixels. Thanks to this approach, server-side rendered markup looks pixel-perfect on the client even before hydration (or even when JavaScript is completely disabled in the browser). To enable server-side rendering, be sure to specify defaultContainerWidth prop. Otherwise, React Photo Album produces empty markup on the server and renders on the client only after hydration.

Credits

Thanks to Sandra G (aka neptunian) for authoring the original react-photo-gallery library that served as inspiration and foundation for react-photo-album.