A place for your work, not another feed.
I built OpenVGal because artwork deserves to be walked through, not scrolled past. A gallery should feel like a room you enter, and building one shouldn’t take 3D modelling skills, a designer, or a line of code.
OpenVGal started in June 2022 as a personal project: I wanted a way to turn folders of my own images into 3D galleries without designing each room by hand. Four years later, the idea is the same and almost everything else has changed.
- v1
Python scripts and hand-edited configuration. It worked, but only for people comfortable with a terminal.
- v2
Executables and a desktop app, to take the code out of the way.
- v3
Everything moved into the browser. Drop your folders, build, download. No installs, no account.
- v4
A new lighting system with soft shadows and baked light, tuned to run on everyday laptops rather than gaming machines.
You own your gallery
What you build is plain HTML and JavaScript files. Put them on any server and they work. No lock-in, no tracking.
Open source, in the open
The engine is MIT-licensed on GitHub. The hosted service runs the same code you can run yourself.
Free to build, paid to publish
The full builder needs no account. Hosting is a convenience you can buy, never a requirement.
Ordinary hardware
A gallery your visitors can't open isn't a gallery. Speed and efficiency come before visual tricks.
Hosting subscriptions and GitHub sponsorship pay for the open-source work. There’s no investor to answer to and nothing hidden behind the free builder. If the hosted service ever went away, your galleries wouldn’t: the files are yours, and the engine is public.
I’m Luis, a photographer and developer, and I use OpenVGal for my own work. You can see it at nostromophoto.com. Questions, bugs, or ideas are always welcome through the contact form or on GitHub.