Description:
Role/Industry: I work as a GIS specialist/consultant (local government)
What I'd like to be able to do:
The new Gallery template in ArcGIS Instant Apps hard-caps the item grid at a maximum of 4 columns, regardless of screen width. This is a regression compared to the legacy Category Gallery template, which scaled the number of visible cards/thumbnails based on available screen width.
I'd like the Gallery template to make the grid responsively scale based on available screen width, so the number of columns adapts to the screen size instead of being fixed at max. 4.
Impact on my work:
With only 4 columns on a large screen, cards become excessively large, and thumbnails are stretched well beyond their native resolution — becoming visibly pixelated. Esri has historically saved thumbnails to 133x200; the current forced 4-column layout pushes card/thumbnail sizes far beyond what our thumbnails were prepared for. Our gallery contains 170 items, and roughly 75% of the thumbnails would need to be replaced with higher-resolution versions to look acceptable at the current forced card size — a significant, avoidable maintenance burden.
More importantly, this hurts usability: users can no longer see the available content at a glance and are forced to scroll unnecessarily through content that would easily have fit on one screen with a legacy Category Gallery-style grid.
I raised this with Esri Support (NL) and was told that rebuilding the gallery in Experience Builder would be a workaround. However, Experience Builder has no out-of-the-box way to automatically and dynamically display cards based on the contents of an ArcGIS Online group. To achieve something similar, I'd be left with three options: (1) manually maintain individual cards for all 170 items, which doesn't scale and defeats the purpose of a group-driven gallery, (2) script the group content into an intermediate feature layer/table (via FME or Python) to feed the List widget in Grid mode, or (3) build a custom widget. All three replace what used to be a basic, no-code configuration option with substantial ongoing engineering and maintenance effort — for something Category Gallery already did natively.
