Does pictures has to be linked?

Linking is needed to tell the plugin which image should be displayed in the lightbox. Normally you don’t want to have a site logo or other decorative images in the lightbox as well.

Usually the images displayed in a page are just small previews and these previews are linked to the original images.

What did you use in the past to show larger versions of your images?

At the moment I integrate pictures, not thumbnail of pictures.
They are therefore resized directly in the html.

I currently use a lytebox, and I implement via Google Tag Manager the ahref in order to make the lytebox work. Meaning that GTM browse the article content, and add the ahref on pictures that are through the content (and therefore ignores logo etc)

I tried earlier to do the same with your plugin : activated it on WP, then adding the ahref via GTM.
It worked once, then it wouldnt, but I think that it was some cache issues between my tests. I need to try again.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 4 months ago by herbertwest1.

Another thing to keep in mind: pictures without a link are not barrier free. People who can’t (or don’t want to) use JavaScript should also be able to open the pictures, not just those which have a JavaScript enabled browser.

Search engines also know about picture galleries with thumbnails linked to original size images – there are thousands of them in the web – and won’t just give the pictures a page rank or reduce the rank of the page which contains the link.

I understand your position, but I respectfully disagree.

People who can’t or do not want to activate javascript, can still see the articles content and the pictures. Nobody stops them from doing a right click and open a picture in a new tab.

As for search engines. Thumbnails are in theory better for the pageload, but then I’d rather be able to show display to google a big picture for instance for google pictures.
And i’d rather not assume that google may or may not distribute pageranks to pictures.

Furthermore, if I have 3000 pages on my website. I will not go and update the articles content individually to add the links on the pictures.
Doing so via Google Tag Manager allows me to be able to provide a lytebox solution to users, without having to worry about links…

This is obviously just my opinion ??

• This reply was modified 5 years, 4 months ago by herbertwest1.

I understand your problem with having 3000 pages to update – eventhough I would just solve this using a filter (Lightbox with Photoswipe is already a filter which adds certain properties to images).

I could add an option “use every image on the page for the lightbox” – but I don’t see the use case for anybody else except you. You are the very first of several thousand users of my plugin who embeds pictures like this. Do you have at least one example of other webpages which work like this?

And about “Nobody stops them from doing a right click and open a picture in a new tab.”. Do you really believe that people do a right click on a picture and open it in a new tab just to check if the picture itself is in fact larger and just scaled down within the page? This is a completely unusual way of presenting pictures in the web.