A display is a saved combination of a query and a layout, with a shortcode. Build it once, put it on as many pages as you like, change it in one place.
Which items
The top section chooses the contents. Every filterable field gets a box; fill in the ones that matter and leave the rest blank.
- Search text — a stored full-text search, across titles, text fields and tag names.
- Media type — everything, photos only, or, with Pro, video only.
- Order by — newest, name, random, or any sortable field, ascending or descending.
- Max items — a hard cap. Zero means no cap. Set a number here and pagination turns off, because a limit and pagination contradict each other.
A display is a query, not a list. Photos uploaded next year that match it appear in it automatically. That is usually what you want; when it is not, filter on something that stops changing, such as an album name.
Layout
Style, columns, gap and corner radius. Then Click opens: the item page, the lightbox, or nothing at all. When it is the item page, the control names the layout in use and links to the picker, because the layout is a site setting rather than part of the display.
Controls that do nothing for the style you chose are greyed out rather than hidden, so you can see they exist. Square-crop belongs to the grid only. Columns does nothing in list view, where Rows across is the equivalent. See Grid, masonry and list.
With Pro you also get gallery and card backgrounds and hover effects here. See Captions, backgrounds, hover.
Captions
Tick which fields appear under each photo, and set where they go: on hover, above, below, or nowhere. Two separator boxes control the punctuation — one between fields, one between values inside a single field. Spaces in them are preserved exactly as typed.
Visitor controls
A display can carry its own toolbar: a search box, filter dropdowns for the fields you tick, a sort dropdown, a photo/video switch, and pagination with a per-page number.
Turn them all off for a gallery that is part of a page’s design. Turn them on for a gallery that is the page.
Preview, save, reuse
Preview renders the display exactly as visitors get it, unsaved changes included, in a frame below the form. Save display commits it and hands you a shortcode.
Two buttons make a set of similar galleries quick:
- Duplicate clones the whole display, query included, as a new one.
- Copy settings from takes another display’s layout, captions and visitor controls and drops them into the form you have open, without touching which items it shows.
Copying carries Pro styling across even when Pro is not currently active, so nothing is silently dropped.
Finding a display later
Past five displays, the sidebar grows a search box and a sort order — by name, recently edited, or oldest first. Every row shows its shortcode; click it to copy.
There are no folders. Naming prefixes do the same job: Home — hero,
Home — strip, Shop — prints sort and search together.
Where a display is used
Deleting a display leaves its shortcode on every page that used it with nothing to render, so JMGallery checks first and warns you how many pages are affected before it goes ahead. Shortcodes in post content, in Elementor’s shortcode widget and in the Elementor gallery widget are all found.
With Pro, each row in the sidebar carries a count, the open display lists the pages it is on with links to view and edit them, and you can swap one display for another across every page that uses it in a single action. That rewrites those pages and cannot be undone, so preview the replacement first.