I have seen videos of this being done. For this just use the built in galleries of the X theme. Can portfolios be used.
From what I seen 3rd party plugins are not needed and would just add bloat. Is that correct.
I searched threads and none really covered what I was after. Also, if I do the display 1 row in the grid Lazy loading will be an option. This would be critical for very large galleries with 100’s of full resolution images.