I’m looking for a way to launch a whole image gallery from a single little icon. To be clear, the launching button is an image that is NOT in the slide show. It’s a tiny icon. So far I’ve found two ways to do this, but neither is ideal. Maybe there is a better stack out there I’m missing? Here’s how I’ve managed to make it kind of work so far.
Using a Big White Duck Limelight, I can use an image as a Lightbox launcher. This works but (as the developer says) it isn’t a great lightbox for just images. I mean, it works so maybe this is the answer.
Using a Foundry Pop-up Gallery has some advantages since it will batch import images from the server (a big plus) and looks lovely. But you have to cheat it to make it launch from a distinct tiny icon. To do that you turn off the thumbnail animation so it only shows one, then you pretend that the thumbnail for the first image is the trigger image you want. The problems here are twofold. It feels like a shoehorning and thus maybe not a good idea. Also, there’s a drop shadow I can’t seem to get rid of around the thumbnail icon. This shadow messes up the style and I can’t seem to get rid of it.
Thanks for the suggestions. Unfortunately both of these require using the first image in the gallery as the thumbnail. I suppose that for Shutter (which has the desirable batch image loading) you could cheat this the same way I have for the pop-up gallery, by giving it a false thumbnail for the first image. But I was looking for one where I don’t have to cheat. Maybe if I try it with Shutter, I can get rid of the tiny drop shadow that Pop-up Gallery puts in. That alone could be worth the cost of admission.
Frag also has batch image loading. The key difference (if I remember correctly) is Shutter can auto-create thumbnails whereas Frag does not. In some cases this is important, and in other cases less so.
Also tagging @Doobox in case he has something extra to add.
Please don’t buy Shutter just to remove the drop shadow. A user on the Elixir forum is trying to aid you in removing that shadow. I believe they just have a small typo in the code snippet.
Thanks Adam. I guess you’d tell me if you thought it was too much of a shoehorn for me to fool the stack into thinking there is only one tiny thumbnail. I kind of thought there might be a solution where it was built to launch from an icon. But if you think this will work OK, then I’ll go that direction.
I’m not telling you what will or won’t work for what you want to do. Simply saying it is not worth spending the extra money on Shutter to simply remove that shadow when someone else is already trying to help you with that.
Whether or not you want to go the route of using something like Popup Gallery for your design will be for you to decide.
Go check that forum post over on the Elixir forum.
I guess you’d tell me if you thought it was too much of a shoehorn for me to fool the stack into thinking there is only one tiny thumbnail. I kind of thought there might be a solution where it was built to launch from an icon. But if you think this will work OK, then I’ll go that direction.