Create a Gallery for Sharing Resources - Azure Virtual Machines

2025-08-20

Azure Compute Gallery (formerly known as Shared Image Gallery) simplifies sharing resources, like images and application packages, across your organization.

Compute Gallery lets you share custom virtual machine (VM) images and application packages with others in your organization, within or across regions, or within a tenant. Choose what resources you want to share, the regions where you want to make them available, and the users you want to share them with. You can create multiple galleries so that you can logically group resources.

The gallery is a top-level resource that can be shared in a way:

Sharing with:	People	Groups	Service principal	All users in a specific subscription or tenant	Publicly with all users in Azure
Role-based access control (RBAC) sharing	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No

Requirements for gallery names

Allowed characters for a gallery name are uppercase letters (A-Z), lowercase letters (a-z), digits (0-9), dots (.), and underscores (_). The gallery name can't contain dashes (-). Gallery names must be unique within your subscription.

Create a private gallery

Sign in to the Azure portal.
Enter Azure Compute Gallery in the search box, and select Azure Compute Gallery in the results.
On the Azure Compute Gallery page, select Add.
On the Create Azure compute gallery pane, select the correct subscription.
For Resource group, select a resource group from the dropdown list. Or, select Create new and enter a name for the new resource group.
For Name, enter a name for the gallery.
For Region, select a region from the dropdown list.
You can enter a short description of the gallery, like My gallery for testing. Then select Review + create.
After validation passes, select Create.
When the deployment finishes, select Go to resource.

Create a gallery by using az sig create. The following example creates a resource group named myGalleryRG in China East, and a gallery named myGallery:

az group create --name myGalleryRG --location chinaeast
az sig create --resource-group myGalleryRG --gallery-name myGallery

Create a gallery by using New-AzGallery. The following example creates a gallery named myGallery in the myGalleryRG resource group:

$resourceGroup = New-AzResourceGroup `
   -Name 'myGalleryRG' `
   -Location 'China North'  
$gallery = New-AzGallery `
   -GalleryName 'myGallery' `
   -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroup.ResourceGroupName `
   -Location $resourceGroup.Location `
   -Description 'Azure Compute Gallery for my organization'

Use the REST API to create a resource group:

PUT https://management.chinacloudapi.cn/subscriptions/{subscriptionId}/resourcegroups/{resourceGroupName}?api-version=2021-04-01

{
  "location": "chinaeast"
}

Use the REST API to create a gallery:

PUT https://management.chinacloudapi.cn/subscriptions/{subscriptionId}/resourceGroups/{resourceGroupName}/providers/Microsoft.Compute/galleries/{galleryName}?api-version=2019-12-01

{
  "properties": {
    "description": "Azure Compute Gallery for my organization"
  },
  "location": "chinaeast",
}

Create an image definition and an image version.
Create a VM from a generalized or specialized image in a gallery.
Create a VM application in your gallery.

Create a gallery for storing and sharing resources

Requirements for gallery names

Create a private gallery

Related content

Additional resources