What are some common methods for dynamically generating image galleries in PHP without altering the original folder structure?

When dynamically generating image galleries in PHP without altering the original folder structure, one common method is to use PHP to scan the directory for images and then display them in a gallery format on a webpage. This can be achieved by using functions like scandir() to retrieve a list of files in a directory, filtering out non-image files, and then dynamically generating HTML markup to display the images.

<?php
// Path to the directory containing images
$directory = 'path/to/images/';

// Get list of files in the directory
$files = scandir($directory);

// Filter out non-image files
$images = array_filter($files, function($file) {
    $extension = pathinfo($file, PATHINFO_EXTENSION);
    $imageExtensions = ['jpg', 'jpeg', 'png', 'gif'];
    return in_array($extension, $imageExtensions);
});

// Display images in a gallery format
echo '<div class="image-gallery">';
foreach ($images as $image) {
    echo '<img src="' . $directory . $image . '" alt="' . $image . '">';
}
echo '</div>';
?>