Just use a table stupid for blogger and gmail
I tried using a word table after watching a video that worked for the person but it takes some tweaking to get the images lined up in a row. I went back and found that an earlier approach using a simple table from VSCode worked really well, including going from 4 to 3 2 1 images. It works in blogger and show up in compose mode. When the screen narrows the image get smaller rather than stacking vertically. The same code works ok in gmail. The images are small but they do expand to full size when clicked. I asked chatGPT for some python code that reads in a file of direct links and populates a table with those and saves it as gallery.html, and here's an example of that.