I am running a photo contest where I need to show thumbnails on the first page with the photo name (entry title) under or next to each photo.
After clicking on a thumbnail the viewer goes to larger images. These must be scaled to fit the window, while not cutting off any part of the photo – this is crucial. Under or next to the photo is a longer description/caption of up to 600 characters.
Finally, the viewer can directly scroll from larger image to larger image without having to return to the thumbnail page each time.
I am currently using “Clearing Gallery” from Joe Workman. You can see it in action on my page here: 2021 ILDA Award Laser Photography entries. It has all of these features except one crucial one. The problem is that some pictures – I think only verticals – have the bottom cut off.
See for example the photo entry “Leaf with Dripping Dew”. On some browsers, depending on the window size and aspect ratio, the blue water at the bottom is cut off. (I actually had to add 250 pixels to the photo height and fill in the bottom 250 pixels with black, to try to push the image up. So you may or may not see the cutoff problem due to this kluge workaround.)
Ordinarily I’d try to find a lightbox/gallery stack with these features on my own. But there are SOOOO many photo stacks and our photo contest competition is already running so time is short.
If anyone has suggestions, I would greatly appreciate it. Again: thumbs with short text, leading to larger photos scaled to fit the window without being cut off and with an area for a fairly long (600 characters) caption, and scrolling through the larger photos.
I chose ProGallery3 from Stacks4Stacks and am very happy. If interested, you can see the results at 2021 ILDA Award Laser Photography entries (scroll down to the “2021 Laser Photography Entries” section).
The only teeny problem is that long captions for vertical photos are cut off depending on the window proportions. For example, if you look at the photo entry “Bouquet of Flowers”, the caption cuts off when the window is in landscape mode. When re-proportioned to a narrow portrait mode, the caption is fine.
I briefly looked at the webpages for the other recommended ones. I didn’t readily see a demo for the other stacks, and I did not see the word “caption” or a screenshot with a caption for Gallery Stack 3, which is why I chose to look at ProGallery3 first. Once I determined via the demo that it had the features I needed, then I went ahead and purchased it.
Thank you again to the developers and users who helped me solve this so quickly!
Many of the lightbox effects are customisable with CSS code. I am often asked by ProGallery users to “tweak” small aspects of the lightbox styling, like caption sizing, colouring, fonts or alignment.
So if there is something remaining that you want slightly adjusted, feel free to email me directly and send the details / download files. I can see what I can do for you, within the capabilities of the particular lightbox effect you are using. It’s something I can often take a look at in an evening.