/eleventy-photo-gallery

Starter site for creating a responsive image gallery using the Eleventy static site generator

Primary LanguageSCSSMIT LicenseMIT

Eleventy Photo Gallery

A starter site for creating your own photo or art gallery using the Eleventy static site generator.

Getting Started

Quickly generate a highly performant photo gallery from this template by clicking the green Use Template button. Creating a template repository provides the same directory structure and files as the original project.

Features

  • Build-time image transformations and responsive image markup in templates using @11ty/eleventy-img
  • High performance and scalable site with 100s across the board on each page using Lighthouse. Check it out on the Eleventy Leaderboards
  • Document metadata populated for social share functionality via eleventy-plugin-metagen
  • Home page with CSS grid displaying the gallery of images
  • Featured image pages with pagination
  • Gallery page
  • About me page
  • CSS preprocessor SCSS

Local Setup

  1. Clone this repo: git clone https://github.com/tannerdolby/eleventy-photo-gallery.git
  2. Navigate to your local copy of the project: cd eleventy-photo-gallery
  3. Install dependencies: npm install
  4. Build: npm run build
  5. Serve locally: npm run start or npm run dev

Usage

Add images to a folder such as images in your project and then supply an array of image metadata objects in a global data file _data/gallery.json:

{
    "title": "Highway covered in water",
    "date": "October 20, 2020",
    "credit": "Photo by Josh Hild",
    "linkToAuthor": "https://www.pexels.com/photo/highway-covered-in-water-2524368/",
    "src": "highway-water.jpg",
    "alt": "Skybridge over highway covered in water",
    "imgDir": "/images/"
}

Once the image data is supplied within the global data file _data/gallery.json then the home page gallery images and featured image pages will display responsive images with <picture> using @11ty/eleventy-img.

If you don't want to use a global data file simply define the image metadata elsewhere such as in your templates front matter or directly inside the img shortcode.

Creating responsive images in templates

  1. Get a large image from somewhere (your file system, a stock photo website, etc)
  2. Add the original image to the src/images/ folder (or a folder of your choice)
  3. Use the img shortcode to generate responsive image markup using <picture>
  4. This performs image transformations at build-time, creating varying image dimensions in the specified formats (.jpg, .webp, etc) from the original image, which outputs to the specified outputDir in the img shortcode within .eleventy.js
{% img 
    src="car.jpg",
    alt="A photo of a car",
    sizes="(max-width: 450px) 33.3vw, 100vw",
    className="my-img",
%}

Compiling SCSS to CSS

All of the projects CSS is compiled from Sass at build-time. The main SCSS file is src/_includes/sass/style.scss and thats where partials, mixins, and variables are loaded in with @use rules.

If you want to change up the styles, you can write directly in style.scss for the changes to be compiled and used.

Otherwise, if you want to continue using a "modular" approach with separate SCSS files. You follow these steps:

  1. Create a new partial file in a specific directory ('sass/partials', 'sass/mixins', 'sass/vars') like _some-file.scss where the underscore prefixed at the beginning signals that the file is a partial. These files are meant to be loaded as modules and not directly compiled.

  2. Write Sass code and style away!

  3. Load the stylesheets with a @forward rule in the index files like @forward "./some-file"; within _index.scss within the directory so they can be loaded with @use in the scss file that is compiled to CSS.

  4. Load the stylesheets using @use rules from the directory in which you need a specific file. Therefore, if I created a new file within sass/mixins called _url-short.scss and wanted to load that file in style.scss, I would use @use "mixins" as * to load the stylesheets within the mixins directory as one module while also ensuring the module isn't loaded with a namespace.

Read more about loading members and namespaces here in Sass docs

Contributing

Feel free to report any issues and submit feature requests. I built this template for others to use so don't hesitate to let me know what you'd like to see added or modified.