Lightbox not working

Hi @cgoodwille,

Can you have a look at your PHP Error Logs? It seems that actually, something odd is happening on the server side (a timeout).

I’ve enabled and monitored PHP error logs but nothing showing up… Any other ideas?

Campbell

Hello @cgoodwille,

I noticed your server was very slow processing each file, and the Lightbox needs to do that to get information from the EXIF. Actually, I realized the process was not very optimized neither, so I made it faster depending on your options (it will be much faster if you check out the Lens, for example), and I added some clever caching.

I just pushed a new version, it is now 1.4.3. Can you try it? I really hope it works, or make things better, this one is basically for you, and for future potential users with the same issue ??

Depending on the server speed, if it’s really bad, then it might start to work after 2-3 page reloads. Let me know.

Hi Jordy,
That’s fantastic – thank you! It seems to be working well now. My server is indeed not the fastest – I just had to migrate from Google Cloud Platform to a server at home to save money but will see if there’s anything I can do to speed it up!

One thing I noticed – portrait images in the lightbox seem to be left-justified. Is this by design or a bug?

Also, any ideas on why the bottom-right thumbnail in the first gallery on the page referenced above (and other galleries with a similar-sized thumbnail) do not show retina versions? All the other thumbnails are retina but that size seems not to be.

Thanks once again,
Campbell

That’s fantastic – thank you! It seems to be working well now. My server is indeed not the fastest – I just had to migrate from Google Cloud Platform to a server at home to save money but will see if there’s anything I can do to speed it up!

Cool! Nice ?? Google Cloud is indeed very good but quite expensive for a WordPress website… You have cheaper alternatives though. For your website, I think a CDN would be very good to have as the images are being served quite slowly (which is not surprising if you are hosting it).

One thing I noticed – portrait images in the lightbox seem to be left-justified. Is this by design or a bug?

It’s by design, it’s also an option. It’s called “Responsive Orientation” in the settings, and you set it to Horizontal if you prefer.

Also, and this is perhaps a different issue, some of the larger thumbnails in the galleries don’t appear to be displaying retina versions – they’re fuzzy in comparison. Is there anything that can done about this?

Indeed, the last thumbnail feels not super Retina, but it actually is, a bit, it’s right between standard and Retina actually. This is a bit hard to do, I am still working on the algorithm to perfect this but it’s actually really hard, and right now I am trying to make sure everything is fast and looks nice. This specific layout in that row shows a size as a relatively unusual bigger size than all the others, that’s where the problem came from. It’s actually quite technical but hopefully, I’ll find a way to handle this better (or the browser src-set algorithm will get better). If you really want to perfect this, I believe I have a hook for it, but that will be quite hard to manage (you can make this look good but much bigger photo will be loaded somewhere where it’s not really needed and will slow all your website).

By the way, if you have some time, do not hesitate to write a review for the Meow Gallery and Meow Lightbox, they are a lot of work but aren’t popular yet (popularity is driven by reviews), and that will help a lot ??

I will have a think about hosting/CDNs – I do have Cloudflare set up, so I hope it’ll speed up a bit as they cache some content.

Thanks for the orientation tip – I wonder if perhaps that option could be labelled a bit more clearly/explicitly? I hadn’t realised that it was referring to that.

I think that I will make do with the gallery as it is – I fully appreciate that some of these things can be highly complex!

And, yes, I will certainly leave reviews for both.

Thanks again
Campbell

Thanks a lot for the very kind reviews, that’s really nice.

Yes, the label could be improved. Maybe just by using “Orientation” and call the first one “Adaptive”?

No problem.

Yes, perhaps that would be better. Although I’m not clear – does it control alignment (justification) or orientation?

The fact it is a vertical photo will basically change the alignment, yes ?? Landscape and portrait photos have a different layout.