Late last year, when the CyanogenMod team announced that it had received another $23 million in funding, it also hinted at a new Gallery app for its ROM. Today, the team has released the first beta of their new Gallery app, known as GalleryNext, on the Play Store. Once GalleryNext is stable enough, it would replace the AOSP Gallery currently shipping with CyanogenMod ROM.

The UI/UX of GalleryNext has been beautifully done and it has some nice features as well, including integration with cloud services like Flickr, Google+ and Facebook. The full feature list of the app is below -:

# View all your pictures in one centralized location
# Cloud services integration with Flickr, Picasa (G+), Facebook, and Dropbox
# Moments support (automatic grouping and classification of media based on metadata)
# Video playback support
# Gif support
# Deduplication in ‘All’ view
# more

Being the first beta, the app does have some rough edges and bugs. Scrolling through your photos can be really jerky if the app is still building the thumbnails — which takes quite sometime. Also, if you open an image while the thumbnails are being build, chances are the app will open the wrong image.

However, knowing the CyanogenMod team, it is just a matter of time before all these bugs are fixed and new features are added including support for KitKat’s Immersive mode, Editor mode and more.

Since the app is currently in beta, users will need to join this community before they can download it from the Play Store.