Surprising ways to enjoy our outstanding image gallery

Your Startpage should be yours, not some random collection of words and images some design or programming department has chosen for you. What do they know about you anyway, really? We at start.me are stern believers in the right to personalize the things you look at all day and every day. That’s why we’re proud to present some hidden features of our premium widget: the Image gallery. Read on to find out everything you need to know.

Of all the building blocks you can use to personalize your start page, the Image gallery widget might just be the most powerful. You can use it to display all kinds of images, in the most popular formats. And don’t worry about sizes: we compress them automatically for you. Your home page will be as fast as ever.

First, add your Image gallery

When you add an Image gallery to your Startpage, the first thing you’ll discover is the way your gallery will blend into the content of your start page. It will adapt perfectly to the other blocks you can place on your screen. This means it will never eclipse the navigational bookmark blocks or the informative News feeds. Depending on the number of columns you’d like to see on your screen, you can change the position of your gallery. And if you’d like a page-wide image, you can change the entire background. But that’s for another tutorial.

Check out some basic features

You just need one image to add the Image gallery widget, but of course, you can add more than one. Just click on the little down-pointing arrow in the right-hand corner. You’ll discover several surprising options to tweak your gallery. Directly add images (Add image) or change their order (Edit). You can also copy the entire gallery to another page (Copy), for example, a page you share with family or friends. You might move the gallery entirely if you want to tidy up (Move). And, when Marie Kondo has really gotten the better of you, you can get rid of these images altogether (Delete). But there’s more: let’s take a second look at the settings option.

Ultimate customization

After you’ve added some more images, preferably in the same dimensions, you can start tweaking by click the cog-icon. On the first menu, you can change the name of your gallery (Title), as well as the icon (Select icon). You can decide if you want your images to change automatically, or just by mouseclick (Slideshow on or off). In the Advanced tab, you can make sure the widget matches the dimensions of your images (Aspect ratio, Orientation). The final option here, Crop images, is my favorite since it effectively eliminates borders. The last tab, Background, gives you full control of the background color and the transparency of the widget. Do try it out.

Add other content

The examples we’ve shown up till now might give you the impression our Image gallery might be best used for personal mementos. But why not use it professionally? The start.me team uses it, for example, to collect the pictures we shot of our brainstorm sessions on a whiteboard. This way our fantastic (and sometimes shitty) ideas remain available and shareable. If you’re working in a more creative sector of industry, we can imagine you’d like to use it to save some images of your design options. Your start page could transform into a fully customizable mood board. Attach a link to each image, for future reference, while you’re at it. Add pictures of vacation destinations, images of inspiring quotes or people, soothing wild- or plant life. In reality, its application is only limited by our imagination.