Google Photos is a good product with a business plan that keeps drifting into the way. Free tier caps have narrowed, subscription prompts have grown, and the “did you back this up?” nudges never stop. If you keep your photos on your phone and do not want a cloud service in the equation, Simple Gallery Pro is the answer.
What it does, and what it does not
Simple Gallery Pro is a gallery for the photos and videos already on your device. Nothing is uploaded to a server. Nothing is scanned by a machine-learning model to guess what is in the picture. Nothing is used to train anything. The app opens, indexes your local media, and shows you the folders, dates, and albums that already exist on your phone.
That is the whole product. Every feature is in service of viewing, organising, and lightly editing what you already have.
What you get on the free version
There is a free version with the essentials — grouping by folder, sorting, hiding folders, pinning favourites, a viewer with pinch-to-zoom, a basic editor for crop and rotate. It is a functional gallery on its own.
What Pro unlocks
The Pro version, a small one-time payment, adds:
- Advanced editor (filters, adjustments, drawing, text overlay).
- Recycle bin with a customisable retention period.
- Password-protecting individual folders or the whole app.
- Colour theming.
- File manager-style operations (copy, move, rename between folders).
The paid version’s biggest selling point is not any single feature: it is the fact that once you pay, the app stops asking you for anything. No ads. No subscription. No trial-ends nag.
Speed on older phones
Simple Gallery Pro is unusually fast on cheap or old hardware. On a two-generation-old mid-ranger it launches in about a second and can scroll through a 40,000-photo library without dropping frames. Google Photos on the same device is noticeably heavier.
Folder-level control
One of the best small features: any folder can be hidden from the gallery, pinned to the top, excluded from indexing, or given a custom name. WhatsApp media, screenshots, and downloaded meme images can all be treated differently. Once configured, the gallery shows you the folders you care about, in the order you want them.
Editor capabilities
The Pro editor is not Snapseed and does not pretend to be. It handles the everyday jobs — crop, rotate, straighten, brightness, contrast, colour balance, filters — and adds a few useful ones like a text overlay and a drawing pen. If your photo editing consists of “make this a little brighter and crop off the person in the corner”, this is enough.
Video
Simple Gallery Pro plays videos through the system video player. It handles trimming, and it will send a video to any editor you have installed via a share sheet. What it will not do is offer a full video editor, and that is fine.
Fine print
Two things worth knowing before you install:
- There are copycat apps in the Play Store with nearly the same name. Install only the genuine one, from the developer listed below.
- The original developer sold the app to a company called Fossify a couple of years ago; a fork called Fossify Gallery exists alongside it and is fully open source and free. If you want the ideology without the paywall, use the fork.
Who should install it
Install Simple Gallery Pro if you want a fast local gallery, you do not need cloud sync, and you want your app to stay bought once you pay for it. Install Fossify Gallery if you want the same features but prefer open source and free.
Stay with Google Photos if you rely on face grouping, natural-language search (“beach 2019”), or the free 15 GB of storage that ties into your Google account.
The verdict
4.5 / 5. Simple Gallery Pro is one of the few paid apps that is nakedly worth its price. The alternative — every other free gallery — either has ads, tracks you, or upsells a subscription. Buying this one is a way to opt out of all of that.
Where to get it: the Simple Gallery Pro listing on the Google Play Store, or the free Fossify Gallery fork.