Album Cover Images and "Detail" Image Titles

@https://www.ads-software.com/support/profile/skyykorat – Albums can use “preview” images from any gallery in the NextGEN Gallery library. I would suggest trying to create an album preview image gallery (one that is not displayed) and then choose your album preview images from that gallery.

You will most likely need to type the name of the image into the album preview selector as generally the images are first drawn from the galleries within the album itself.

Thanks!

– Cais.

PS: Searching the forums is something easier if you use advanced Google techniques (or whatever other search engine you prefer) rather than the search here, it also depends on how specific your search term is …

I’m continuing to fiddle, but I’m doing this wrong… I created a gallery and put the images in it I’d like to use as the album covers.

Is the “NextGen Gallery library just the images in the gallery subfolders? That appears to be where the images in all my galleries are.

Unfortunately, I’m not getting how to grab an image from a folder under the gallery folder and put it in the preview image of albums in my hierarchy.

For example, I have album “A” at the top. It contains albums “B” and “C”. Album “C” contains albums “D”, “E” and “F”. Album “B” has galleries “M” and “N”. Album “D” has galleries “P”, “Q” and “R” and album “F” has a couple galleries. I want to put different cover images on every album from “A” through “F”. Where do I attach the gallery of cover images so every album up the tree can see them? And how do I make a gallery “not displayed”?

In the album edit, I can get the line with the magnifier glass, and I can put in a filename, but it ignores it. I’ve copied the filename from the gallery of cover images, I’ve put the full location of the filename from the gallery subfolder, I’ve tried other combinations, but I haven’t gotten the album to use a file…

And how do I get image filenames or image titles to display on the detail images? Hovering on a thumbnail shows a filename, but I have nothing on the large detail images.

I’m completely flummoxed… From Album “A” (top level) I can see the cover images that I put in the new gallery. It’s not attached to the album tree.
BUT, from album “B” (level 2) I CANNOT see the images in the cover gallery that isn’t attached to the album tree.

I’ve tried searching for images, I’ve tried entering images in album “B”. They get ignored. I’ve attached the cover gallery to album “B”. Now I can select an image but the cover gallery displays. And the gallery attached to album “B” can’t be seen by “C” or any of it’s children albums.

I like this gallery, and if 12 MILLIION people are using it there’s GOTTA be a SIMPLE, IDIOT-PROOF way of getting cover images on the albums – but I’m missing it.

Same for titles on the detail images. I’m currently searching, but there’s gotta be a million people that need visible titles, so there’s got to be some simple way to turn them on…

I’ve made a LITTLE progress. I got the image title to show up on the clicked image in the Fancybox by modifying gallery-caption.php. I’m guessing it won’t survive the next update.

I’m trying to change the font size and other parameters of the title display, and I’ve found jquery.fancybox-1.3.4.css. In there I found

#fancybox-title {
font-family: Helvetica;
font-size: 36px;
z-index: 1102;
}
which I changed from 12px to 36 so I could tell if it worked. Is this change one of those things I should put in the styles customization section? If so, do I need to put it inside something to work?

I’ve read at least a dozen discussions now on album preview images and I STILL can’t figure out how to get the image I want onto the album as a cover image…

@skyykorat – My apologies for complicating the idea of an album preview image that is not displayed in the gallery … it should be much more simpler to do.

Create your album; create your galleries; include in the galleries the images you want to use as the album preview image BUT make sure those images are “excluded” from under Gallery > Manage Galleries. It is generally best to pull the preview image from the gallery directly within the album rather than a sub-album’s gallery as well.

As to the issues with the Fancybox library, we include the Lightbox libraries with NextGEN Gallery as a convenience, we do not offer any support for making modifications to those libraries. You will need to look into the specific libraries documentation and/or work with its author to make any modifications … these modifications will also not be update safe so please keep backups of your changes.

Thanks!

– Cais.

Thanks, Cais… I don’t think YOU complicated things – I think my newness and general ignorance are the larger problem.
The way you described the cover image is the way I eventually did it – purely by accident, but my workflow may be a bit convoluted:
Create Level 1 Album
Create multiple Level 2 Albums – these are the ones that need the cover images
Create several Galleries that will be attached to the various level 2 albums.
Go to album management, to a Level 2 album and drag the correct galleries to the album
Edit the album and select the logo image I want to use for the cover
Save the album and go back to gallery management
Select the gallery and exclude the image I used for the album
Repeat for each of the level 2 albums.

I can’t just create the gallery, import the images, then exclude the one I want to use for the cover because when I go to the album, that image isn’t in the image list to select.
And I can’t wait until I put the albums on the page then use the “Sort or Exclude Images” because then the albums won’t display – I get a “No images found” message.

BUT, at a later time, if I create an additional gallery and add it to a level 2 album that has a cover that is now excluded, when I update the album it appears to CHANGE the cover to one of the available images. SO FAR, when I’ve done that it doesn’t appear to change on the page, but I keep thinking at some point, when I’m not paying attention my covers are going to suddenly change to images in one of the child galleries…

BTW: I’m not sure if it will be a problem, but I’m almost guaranteed to have situations with at LEAST four levels of albums before I get to a gallery. Some of the album images will likely be from the gallery, but at least two of the four levels of albums are likely to use images I don’t want displayed in the galleries. Is this likely to be a problem?

@skyykorat – Following the last process to set album preview images should still work correctly.

Thanks for asking!

– Cais.