Template gallery: choose the template first, then the images.
Heckgalerie keeps your images where WordPress already keeps them. A gallery here is a list of ordinary media attachments, not a second media library with its own database tables, its own upload folder and its own backup problem. That has three consequences you can check: srcset and image sizes come from WordPress, alt texts stay the ones you typed in the media library, and the images appear in the WordPress image sitemap without a plugin bridge.
Two things follow from that decision:
- Uninstalling loses nothing. Your images are attachments. Delete Heckgalerie and they are still there, still in the media library, still in every post that links to them.
- Front-end weight stays measurable. All front-end files together are under 15 KB gzipped, and JavaScript is only enqueued on pages that actually contain a slider or a lightbox. Grids and logo bars are CSS only, so pages without a gallery load nothing at all.
Two more parts deal with the image files themselves:
- EXIF and GPS data are stripped from the resized versions WordPress generates for the web. Cameras and phones write coordinates, serial numbers and timestamps into image files; a gallery of an event can publish the location of a private address without anyone noticing. Your uploaded original stays untouched.
- A migration assistant for NextGEN Gallery reads the existing NextGEN tables, registers the image files as WordPress attachments without moving or copying them, and rewrites the NextGEN shortcodes in your posts. The old version of each post is kept as a revision, and nothing in NextGEN is deleted.
Heckgalerie is part of the Hafenstudios fleet. It works on its own and cooperates with the other fleet plugins once they are active.
Templates
Galleries: grid, masonry, justified and album.
Logo bars: logo grid and single row.
Sliders: crossfade.
The lightbox is included with every template. Block and shortcode use the same renderer, so both produce identical markup.
Albums: several galleries, one page
An album bundles other galleries. Each one gets a tile with a cover image, its name and the image count; one click opens it on the same page, a second click goes back. No subpages, no JavaScript.
Capture data in the lightbox
The lightbox can show a discreet line with camera, aperture, exposure time, ISO, focal length and capture date, for photography sites where that is content. The setting is off by default.
Coordinates are never displayed. Heckgalerie reads exactly those six fields, so a location cannot reach the output even if another plugin writes one into the image data.
Accessibility
The lightbox is a native <dialog> element with full keyboard operation. Every automatic movement stops as soon as the operating system reports “reduce motion”. The admin screens work without JavaScript: the builder is an enhancement, and the shortcode is shown as plain text either way.
Privacy
No tracking pixel, no cookie, no request to another server, in the admin area or on the front end. There is nothing about this plugin to declare in a privacy policy.