Customizing a space

A room you can re-hang.

The build is a first draft. Every decision it made for you — which style the rooms are in, how big each piece hangs, what it is called, which room a visitor meets first — is yours to change, before you save and long after you have published.

Two screens do this work: the builder, before a gallery is saved, and the space editor in your dashboard, for a gallery already in your account. They overlap almost entirely. Where they differ, it is said below.

Where the controls are

There are two of them, and which one you are in depends on where the gallery lives, not on what you want to change.

In the builder

Before you save anything. Customize on the result card opens the artwork editor; the style picker and Gallery settings sit further up the page. No account, nothing uploaded.

In the dashboard

Any gallery in your account, draft or live. Open it from your list of galleries and you can take similar decisions over the space as it stands, plus some additional options: add artworks, reorder rooms, pick music from our catalogue or change the brand sign over the entrance.

If you host the gallery yourself, neither screen is where you work: you change what you want in the builder and save a fresh copy, or edit the files you already have. The self-hosting guide covers that.

Customize in the builder: the info fields, a room's apply-to-all row, and a size row under every piece, with S, M, L, the slider and the cm/in switch.

There are two ways to customize characteristics: per item or per the whole room at once. There is a section (highlighted in the figure below) that allows to apply changes to all artworks at once: a title prefix, a subtitle, an info field or a size.

The apply-to-all row at the top of a room: title prefix, subtitle for all, one info field for all, and one size for everything in it.

Changing room style

A style is a coordinated set of rooms — walls, floor, illumination, and the lighting baked into them. There are five, and the whole gallery is in one of them.

Classic: A mix of modern and classic materials. Ten doorways off the entrance hall.
Dark: Dark walls, with frames lit from behind. Ten doorways off the entrance hall.
Modern: Pale and plain, the least furnished of the five. Six doorways off the entrance hall.
School: An art-school space. Eight doorways off the entrance hall.
Warm: Classic, in warm tones. Four doorways off the entrance hall.

Changing style in the dashboard re-hangs every room: a different style is a different set of walls, so no room keeps a template from the style it left. Your titles, subtitles and sizes survive it. The exact wall a piece lands on may not.

The number of doorways in the entrance hub is part of the style, and it decides how many rooms hang off it (ten in Classic and Dark, eight in School, six in Modern, four in Warm). Past that a second hall opens behind one of those doorways and your rooms are divided between the two. In the dashboard you see the split as a separator in the room list.

Changing size

Sizes are real-world measurements. A piece set to 120 cm is 120 cm on the wall, and a visitor standing in front of it reads it at that size.

S · M · L: 60, 120 and 180 cm on the longest edge. M is what everything starts at.
Slider: Anything from 20 to 250 cm, when none of the three is what you want.
cm / in: Switches the readout between centimetres and inches. It changes nothing in the gallery.
Both edges: Shown beside the slider. The shorter one follows the aspect ratio of your file.

Every artwork starts at 120 cm on its longest edge, whatever the file is. That is the default behaviour. For photographs is usually fine, as there is no predefined physical size, but paintings have a true physical size. To change the size there are 3 presets (S/M/L) or a slider to choose exactly the size. The size is expressed in the units that you choose (cm or inches)

Each room also has a row (highlighted in the figure above) that applies one size to everything in it, which is the fastest way through a series that should all read the same.

Changing a size re-hangs the room it is in, because the layout is packed against the walls available. A room whose work no longer fits moves into a larger room, or splits into two joined by a door. Nothing is lost in the move; the arrangement changes.

None of this touches your images. Size is how large the piece is mounted, not how many pixels it has — preparing artwork covers what to export.

Changing titles, subtitles and plaques

A title starts as the file name without its extension, and a subtitle starts empty. Both are yours to rewrite, and a subtitle is the line for a year, a medium, a dimension, an edition number or the author.

Per room there are two shortcuts, both worth knowing before you edit forty fields by hand:

A title prefix goes on the front of every title in the room. Your trailing space is the separator, so Series A — reads the way you typed it.
A subtitle for all puts one line under every piece in the room.

Plaques — the museum labels beside each piece — are a single switch for the whole gallery, and they start off. With them off the title is still there: a visitor who clicks a piece reads it in the panel that opens beside it. The navigation guide has that panel in full.

Adding info fields

A title and a subtitle are short. For anything longer — a statement, the medium and edition, provenance, a price — each artwork can carry info fields: text a visitor reads when they click the piece, under its title and subtitle.

The fields belong to the gallery; each artwork holds its own value for them. Define them once in the Info fields section at the top of the editor:

A new gallery starts with one field, Description. It is an ordinary field: rename it, move it or delete it.
+ Add field adds another, up to 5. A label is up to 24 characters, so Price, Edition or Provenance is one rename away.
Renaming or reordering a field changes the label only. Every artwork keeps what you wrote under it.
Deleting a field that some artworks already have text for asks first, and then clears that text.

The Info fields list at the top of the editor: Description and Edition, with move, delete and + Add field.

Under each artwork’s title and subtitle there is an Info row, closed until you open it. It reads how many fields are filled and how much room is left. Each artwork holds up to 2,000 characters in all — title, subtitle and every field together — and a field stops accepting text when the artwork is full.

An artwork's Info row opened: one box per field, with the filled count and the characters left.

The room’s apply-to-all row has a field option too: pick a field, write the value, Apply. If some pieces in the room already hold a different value it asks before replacing them, and a piece the value would push past 2,000 characters is skipped. The line under it says how many were set and how many were skipped.

Values are plain text. Line breaks are kept; there is no formatting and links are not made clickable. Plaques do not change — the fields only show when a visitor clicks the piece.

Changing the exhibition title and description

The gallery as a whole has a title and a description, separate from the titles of the pieces in it. Visitors find both at the top of the gallery map, and the description is also what search engines and shared links show under the title.

In the builder, both are in Gallery settings: a title of up to 120 characters and a description of up to 1,000. The title is needed to save as a draft, because the gallery’s address is made from it — Early Work 2024 becomes early-work-2024.
In the dashboard, click the gallery’s name at the top of its page to rename it. The new name is saved at once, on its own. The description is a field in the space editor and is saved with the rest of your changes.

The address is fixed once the draft exists. Renaming the gallery changes what visitors read, never the URL, so links you have already shared keep working.

Adding music

A gallery can have one background track. Visitors get a speaker button with a volume slider to turn it down or off; the navigation guide has how it plays.

Your own MP3, up to 10 MB. Add it in the builder under Background music in Gallery settings, or later in the dashboard. It travels with the gallery and counts towards your storage like an image.
A track from our catalogue, free on any paid plan, with no credit line needed. Pick it in the dashboard after saving: choose a track, Play to hear it, Use to set it.

In the dashboard, Music sits at the top of the gallery’s page. Switch between From the catalogue and Your own MP3, and Remove takes the music out entirely. Choosing a catalogue track replaces your own MP3 and gives its storage back. On a live gallery visitors hear the change the next time they open it; on a draft it plays once you publish.

Before we publish your own MP3 — when you save a draft with music, or upload a track in the dashboard — you tick a box confirming you own the music or have the right to publish it online.

Music is stored in the same file as the rooms, so the Music section waits while the space editor has unsaved changes. Save them first.

Catalogue tracks are licensed for playback on OpenVGal only, so a downloaded copy of the gallery leaves them out. Your own MP3 is included.

Changing the order of the rooms (Only Dashboard)

In the dashboard the rooms are a list, in the order visitors meet them, and the list is the building. Drag a room, or use the arrows, and the doorways rearrange themselves to match.

Rename a room by clicking its name. The name is what a visitor sees, and it is also what a link to that one room carries — rename it and older links to it stop landing there.
Remove a room, or a single piece, without touching the rest.
Add artwork to a room, or drop folders onto the page to add whole rooms. Each folder becomes a room named after the folder, exactly as in the builder.
Pick the thumbnail — the picture your gallery shows when it is listed or shared — from any piece in any room.

A room with nothing in it is allowed. Visitors can still walk into it.

The room list in the dashboard, in the order visitors meet them, with the hall sign below it.

Renaming a room moves no files. Pictures already in it keep loading from the folder they arrived in, and only work added afterwards lands under the new name. None of this is visible to a visitor; it matters only if you go looking in storage.

Changing the logo over the entrance (Only Dashboard)

Every gallery has a lit sign on the entrance-hall wall, showing the brand logo. On any paid plan you can replace it with your own in the editor, so visitors walk into your gallery rather than ours.

It is a lit mask, not a picture: white line art on black, PNG, transparency welcome, up to 5 MB.

On a live gallery the new sign is what visitors see as soon as the edge picks it up; on a draft it is stored now and goes up when you publish. A gallery already open in someone’s browser keeps the old sign until that page is reloaded.

Hosting the gallery yourself, the sign is a file: replace materials/logo.png in your copy. Same rules, and 1024 × 512 px is the size to aim for.

Change builder settings

Two decisions belong to the builder’s Gallery settings and are fixed once the gallery is built. The space editor keeps them exactly as they are and does not offer them.

Frames: On by default. Off mounts each image flush to the wall at its own size.
Entrance hall: Skipping it opens the gallery straight into your only room. One folder only, and the lit sign goes with the hall.

To change either one, rebuild in the builder with the setting you want and save over what you have.

Self-hosting covers the other ending: the same gallery as files on a server of your own.

Open your dashboard