Assuming this is ProGallery 3 being discussed here, the ALT field isnât suitable for longer caption content and HTML markup, like line breaks and lists. ALT is an acronym for âalternative textâ. You can learn some more about it here. It gets used by assistive devices (like screen readers), search engines and machine learning / AI tools. Ideally you use ALT attributes to provide one or two sentences in plain text, explaining what your image is about. That way, people or machines who cannot view the image as you see it on the screen still have details explaining what the image is about.
For ProGallery 3, the exact setup of caption content depends on what image source you are using. Picking Single Dragged Image as an example, there is a dedicated box shown in the settings labelled Caption Content. Although plain âlorem ipsum dolerâ text is shown to start with, you can replace this with your own text. Basic HTML tags like <br> for line breaks might work. However the presentation of this caption content would depend on what lightbox is used. Some of the lightboxes I list donât support captions at all, or convert them to plain text. So your milage may vary.
What I did in Pro Gallery 4 was to completely rewrite the entire codebase for handling caption content and the lightbox. Taking a single image as an example, in edit mode you now have separate drop zones for both the thumbnail content and lightbox content. Any basic stacks can be dragged and dropped into either. This makes it really easy to load-in caption content with HTML or Markdown formatting applied. As can be seen in this screen grab, Pro Gallery 4 respects this formatting and displays things exactly as you want:
You can do headings, paragraphs, lists, links and buttons. Iâve even seen someone do a shopping cart! Itâll handle it all, really easily for you. The caption content has a maximum width applied, to constrain content and keep things readable. All aspects of the caption alignment and styling can be changed within the settings.
As a side note, thereâs some clever functionality built into the Pro Gallery 4 lightbox, to analyse the size of your image and caption content. The option is provided for you to have the lightbox automatically arrange the image and caption content for âbest fitâ. In other words, maximising the size of the image, while still ensuring the caption content fits on the screen. In some instances, this results in the caption content being placed to the right of the image, as can be seen here:
This provides a big upgrade in caption and lightbox capabilities, over what we had before. The artists and photographers currently testing and using Pro Gallery 4 have all unanimously said its brilliant for their portfolios.
