Simple Gallery Pro

Review by eFreeware

The gallery that comes with a phone is usually the app you open most and think about least, until it does something you dislike. Simple Gallery Pro, from Simple Mobile Tool, is a paid alternative built around the idea that your media should stay on your device and behave the way you want.

It is a gallery and a photo editor in one, priced at $2.99, with no ads and no in-app purchases. It covers the viewing and editing features Android users tend to miss: browsing, organizing, cropping and editing, recovery of deleted files, hidden galleries and locks. With more than a million installs and a 4.5 average across 160,019 ratings, it has clearly found an audience since its release in November 2018.

What separates it from the stock app on most phones is the combination of file handling and privacy tools. It reads a wide spread of formats, gives you control over how the interface looks and works, and lets you put a lock on private material. For anyone who treats a phone as the main place their photos live, those are the features that matter day to day.

Everyday browsing and organizing

The core job is looking through what you have and keeping it in order. The app browses and manages photos and videos, and the developer describes the file organizer and album tools as improved, with gestures meant to make editing quick rather than fiddly. I would expect the appeal here to be speed and directness: open a folder, see the images, move or delete what you do not want, without the app second-guessing you.

Format support is broader than many phone galleries offer. JPEG and PNG are the basics, but the app also handles MP4, MKV, RAW, SVG, GIF and panoramic photos, among others. That matters if you shoot RAW and want to review those files on the phone, or if your library has accumulated animated images and panoramas that other viewers treat as oddities. A gallery that opens everything you throw at it saves you from hunting for a second app.

Customization is the other half of the browsing experience. The developer says the design is highly customizable, from the interface itself to the buttons on the bottom toolbar, and that colors can be adjusted. I like the sound of that because gallery layouts are personal: some people want large thumbnails and few controls, others want dense folders and quick access to editing. Being able to shape the toolbar to the jobs you actually do is more useful than a fixed set of buttons chosen by someone else.

Editing without leaving the gallery

Editing is built in rather than bolted on. You can crop, flip, rotate and resize pictures, and apply filters for a different look. Gestures handle much of the editing work. That is a sensible scope for a gallery: the adjustments people reach for most often, available the moment a photo catches their eye, instead of a separate editor with its own import step.

I would not expect this to replace a dedicated photo editor for layered or precision work. What it offers is the quick pass: straighten a crooked shot, trim a distraction out of the frame, resize something before sending it, or apply a filter and move on. For a large share of the photos people take, that is the whole job.

The editing tools sit alongside the same file handling as the rest of the app, so the formats the gallery can open are the formats you can work with. If your library mixes phone snaps, RAW files and the occasional GIF, having one place to view and adjust them keeps things simple.

Recovery and hidden galleries

Two features stand out for anyone who has ever deleted the wrong thing or wanted certain photos kept out of sight. The app can recover photos and videos that were deleted by accident, a safety net for irreplaceable files. Deletion mistakes are common and usually noticed too late, so having recovery inside the gallery rather than in a separate utility is a practical arrangement.

The second feature is hidden galleries. You can create them for images and videos you would rather not have sitting in the main view, and the app doubles as a vault for that material. This is the kind of thing that is easy to get wrong, but the approach described is straightforward: keep private media in its own space rather than relying on a folder name nobody else will notice.

Protection goes further than hiding. You can lock selected photos, videos and files behind a PIN, pattern or fingerprint. The app itself can be locked, and so can individual functions within the organizer. That layering is what makes the privacy features credible: it is not just a curtain over a folder, but a set of locks you can apply where you need them.

What you need before installing

There is very little to arrange, and it asks for no unnecessary permissions. For a gallery, that combination is unusually clean.

The app is fully open source, which will matter to some readers more than others. If you prefer to know that the software managing your personal media can be inspected, that is a point in its favor. If you simply want the app to work, the practical effect is the same: a gallery that does its job locally.

Material design is used throughout, with a dark theme by default and adjustable colors. The most recent update, from October 2023, brought translation work along with stability, user experience and interface improvements. The app has been available since November 2018, so this is a mature piece of software rather than a new experiment.

Who gets the most from it

This is a good fit for someone whose phone is their main camera and whose photo library has grown into something worth managing. If you shoot in more than one format, keep panoramas and animated images alongside ordinary snapshots, or simply want your folders shown the way you arranged them, the app's breadth of file support and customization are the reasons to choose it.

It also suits readers who care about where their photos live. The open-source code and the built-in locks all point in the same direction: media that stays under your control. Anyone uneasy about a gallery that wants a network connection will find the approach here reassuring.

The $2.99 price is the main thing to weigh. It buys a gallery without advertising and without purchases, and for people who open their photos most days, that is a small one-time cost against a daily annoyance. The privacy tools and format support are what make it more than a paid version of something you already have.

A gallery worth paying for

Simple Gallery Pro does a set of jobs that phone galleries often do badly: it opens a wide range of file types, lets you arrange the interface around your habits, edits photos without a separate app, recovers deleted media and keeps private material behind PIN, pattern or fingerprint locks. The developer's emphasis on privacy gives the whole package a coherent purpose.

The trade-offs are modest but real. It is a paid app rather than a free download, and the editing tools are the quick adjustments a gallery needs rather than a full editing suite. For most people, neither will be a problem, but it is worth being clear about the scope.

I would point this at readers who want a private, ad-free home for their photos and videos and are willing to pay once for it, especially those with mixed-format libraries or a need to keep some media locked away.

What's new in version 6.28.1

Added some translation, stability, UX and UI improvements