What I learned porting the Next.js Gallery to a Vite SPA

I’ve always admired the Next.js Gallery template ( https://nextjsconf-pics.vercel.app/ ). It’s a beautiful

piece of engineering, but it relies on a lot of "framework magic" from things like next/image and server-side functions that just work, but are

sometimes hard to peek inside of.

I decided to try porting it to a Vite SPA (Single Page Application). Not because Vite is "better," but because I wanted to see if I could

replicate those high-end features using simpler, more transparent building blocks like Bun/NodeJS, Sharp, and Supabase.

Here’s what that process looked like.

The Goal: High Performance without the "Magic"

The original template feels great because of two things: layout stability (no jumping around) and those smooth "blur-up" image loads.…