I regularly need to use the repeater field in place of the image gallery field. The reason for this is I work a lot with creative clients who want to display a gallery that’s a mix of both images and mp4 looping videos.
What’s great with the gallery field, is you can re-order the rendered images in gutenberg in an intuitive and quick manner. With the repeater field however, you need to go to the ‘edit view’ and re-order the fields vertically. This would be fine if not for the fact that often each item has a lot of additional fields for various reasons. This can make it hard to identify which item to drag; and in a long list of items, it can take a good 60 seconds to drag an item from the bottom to the top – due to the drag limitations when you reach the top of the visible area.
One work around I found was to collapse each repeater field and set the collapse to only show the image field. This is a little easier but you have to manually collapse each item (there’s no default state option to start collapsed) (also a slow process); and because my repeaters feature both images and videos, the video items don’t display anything because they don’t have an image in the image field.
In an ideal world, we could re-order the rendered items in the same way as you can the image gallery….