How to Create Horizontal Scrolling Images in Squarespace 2026, with Auto Play & Thumbnails

From the page editor, click Add a Section to open Squarespace's content picker, which groups options like Digital Products, Scheduling, Donations, Images, Videos, Menus, Forms, Charts, and Audio. Choose Images, and you're shown pre-built layout starting points: some built around a large hero-style photo with brand copy overlaid, others pairing a smaller image with a text block. Any of them works as a starting point, since the layout type changes in the next step regardless.

Once images are loaded into the section, open its settings panel and check Gallery Type. By default it's Grid: Simple.

The same dropdown lists Grid: Strips, Grid: Masonry, and three slideshow variants: Slideshow: Simple, Slideshow: Full, and Slideshow: Reel. Any of the three turns the static grid into a slideshow, but they aren't equivalent.

According to Squarespace's own gallery-section documentation, Autoplay is only available on Slideshow: Simple or Slideshow: Full. Thumbnails is available on Slideshow: Simple alone.

That leaves Slideshow: Reel, the layout that visually looks most like a horizontally scrolling filmstrip since it shows several images at once, without a built-in way to auto-advance; visitors scroll it by hand unless custom code is added, which is outside what this guide covers. If both autoplay and a thumbnail strip matter, Slideshow: Simple is the only layout that gives you both.

With Slideshow: Simple selected, the panel switches to slideshow-specific controls: Controls Location for where the previous/next arrows sit, Height presets from S to a custom size, and a Width slider for how much of the section each slide fills. 80 out of 100 leaves a bit of surrounding space so the image doesn't feel cropped tight to the edges. The Thumbnails toggle beneath adds a strip of preview images below the main slide, letting visitors jump straight to a specific photo instead of clicking through one at a time.

Further down the same panel, Autoplay makes the gallery advance on its own instead of waiting for a click, and Slide Duration sets how many seconds each image stays on screen. With Thumbnails and Autoplay both on, the gallery shows the current slide large, a strip of clickable thumbnails underneath, and advances automatically at whatever pace is set.

There's no universal right duration. Something under two seconds suits a fast-moving showcase of many small products; a portfolio piece or a before-and-after photo, with detail worth studying, reads better closer to three or four seconds. Scrub the slider and watch the preview at that pace before settling on a number, since it depends on how long visitors need to look at each image.

The same settings panel includes a Captions toggle and, further down, styling options like a section Divider with different shape presets. Captions help when an image needs context a viewer wouldn't get from the photo alone; leave them off for a purely visual showcase where text would clutter the frame. The divider shape separates this section from whatever comes next on the page, and it previews live as you click through the options, so it costs nothing to try a few.

Before publishing, switch the editor's preview to the mobile icon at the top to confirm the slideshow scrolls and autoplays the same way on a phone screen, since gallery sections can behave differently at narrow widths. Once both views look right, save the section and publish the page. The gallery goes live exactly as configured, with no separate embed step.