Google photos cannot show overlay

Do you have a URL I can look at?

https://roomofresonance.com/summer-2018-family-reunion/

Ideally I’d like to be able to not show the overlay, unless someone clicks the “see more photos” button. I did finally get the overlay to show, but now it is coming up automatically when the page loads.

Not really sure I understood what you are attempting to do, so maybe some definitions will help:

• An overlay is something that shows up with all photos within an album. It can only show up when you explicitly click on an album thumbnail. For an example see the section titled “Show More” within Album. Clicking on an album thumbnail shows the photos within that album.
• A lightbox on the other hand is something that you see when you click on an individual image. E.g. If you click on a photo that shows up in the overlay in the above link, you will see a lightbox. Or, for that matter, if you are trying to click any photo in the link that you have provided, what Photonic is trying to open up is a lightbox.

Now, what I am seeing with your site is just a collection of photos within an album. That is not an overlay, rather it is similar to what you see in this link (i.e. Photos within an Album).

When you click on “See more photos”, it should simply add more photos to the layout (which is exactly what is happening right now). If you really want an “overlay”, you should look to use the example in the first link that I have provided above. Essentially, when you are building your gallery (using the “Add / Edit Photonic Gallery button or the Photonic block):

1. In the screen “Choose Type of Gallery” pick the option “Multiple albums”
2. In the next screen titled “Pick your albums”, pick the album that you want to show (pick just one album).
3. Select the layout in the “Pick Your Layout” (anything should be fine), and then in the next screen “Configure Your Layout” set the following:

1. Show an overlaid popup panel → Yes
2. Number of photos to show in overlaid popup → 100 (not more!)
3. “More” button text in overlaid popup → Whatever you want your more button to be.

I don’t actually want an overlay, but according to this link, the “see more” button requires the overlay. Or so I understood. It seems to be working fine for now though.

That person was trying to show a collection of albums, and then see the photos in each album – for that you would need to show the overlay (if you see the link I have provided over there, it is the same that I have provided you in my response above).

Basically if you are showing a single album of photos you need nothing – simply setting the “more” option in the shortcode (or in the gallery builder) does the trick. Basically the “More” button can be displayed in two places:

1. Directly on your page, where it shows up if you want to load up more photos or albums – this feature has existed in Photonic for a few years now.
2. Within an overlay, where it shows up only if you have clicked on an album thumbnail to show an overlay. This was developed late last year when Google released its API, exclusively to get around Google’s ridiculously low limit of 100 photos, where people displaying a collection of albums would get stuck without being able to show all photos within.