How to add text between galleries in an album

Hi @chhag,

Thanks for asking us.

I would try Pro List Album display type that allows entering long descriptions for each of your galleries: https://www.imagely.com/wordpress-gallery-plugin/pro-list-album/

Hope this helps

• This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by Mihai Ceban.

Thanks for your swift answer mihai-imagely.

The link that you included shows that the text can be added to the right side of each (image of) the galleries in the that album.

This is not the layout that I meant. I mean the layout from this page:
https://khagenaars.nl/demo-teams/

But then made as an album or any other way that the images of each of the galleries are visible, but that I can include text in between these galleries.
On the page I made I did that in what can only be an unusual way: the fact that the breadcrumbs do not show correctly is an indication of that. I think that an album, being a collection of galleries, should offer some possibilities to configure it to include text in between (that not being the right side of) the galleries.

I hope I can do that in such a way that my breadcrumbs are correct.
In the case of this page, the breadcrumb should be:
Home >> Specials Album >> Demo Teams
and not
Home >> Demo Teams

Is that possible?

Hi @chhag,

Thanks for the detailed explanation. So lets start by confirming that you can’t really add any custom text between the images or galleries that are being added via a single NextGen Gallery module or shortcode, but ( as you already seem to know ) you can add multiple gallery/albums using multiple shortcodes/modules to be able to place some custom text between those.

Now back to the structure aspect. I see that you have already managed to get the wanted breadcrumb path now “Home => Specials Album => Royal Netherlands Air Force – back in time”

Thanks for your reply, mihai-imagely.

So now I know that in NextGEN I cannot add text between the parts (images) in a NextGEN gallery. That this is not possible in a normal gallery, I understand (a gallery is aimed at showing images). But that it is not possible to add text between the thumbnails in an album is kind of a surprise to me.

You are right about the breadcrumbs on the page “https://khagenaars.nl/specials-album/”: “Home => Specials Album => Royal Netherlands Air Force – back in time”. These are indeed working okay.
The structure of that page is that links to separate pages (each with one gallery) are placed here. On those 2nd level pages there are NextGEN galleries with separate blocks for the text in between. It was no problem to place those blocks for the text there. And the breadcrumbs work fine there too.

But the structure of the page “https://khagenaars.nl/overview-in-years/” is different.
Here there is a NextGEN album that contains 3 other NextGEN albums: one for each year. These 2nd level NextGEN albums each have multiple NEXTGEN galleries for that year. The galleries themselves are the 3rd level in the NextGEN hierarchy. So:
-toplevel = page with NextGEN album named “Overview in Years”.
-2nd level = not a page, but in the album “Overview in Years” are the 3 albums “Overview Airshows 2017”, “Overview Airshows 2018” and “Overview Airshows 2019”.
-3rd level = no pages, but the galleries in the 3 albums “Overview Airshows 20xx”.

In this structure I have the problem with the breadcrumbs behaving strangely.
There are 2 separate breadcrumbs that seem to originate seperately from the NextGEN album and the page.
I would like to see one line of breadcrumbs, and that should be correct and complete of course.

This is not a particular strange structure, but I cannot find anything on how to do that (even after searching this forum or after searching google).
How to do this?

I am just starting with setting up a website and I want to find out what plugins like NextGEN can (and cannot…) do.
I like what I see from NextGEN so far, but the breadcrumbs that I think are essential give me problems. The cause seems to be that it is not passible to get breadcrumbs on normal NextGEN-galleries, only on NextGEN-albums.
But I cannot imagine that I am the first to run into this problem, because my structure of “an album of albums” cannot be unique for photo websites. So I expect (hope) that my lack of experience prevents me from finding the correct setting. And that i why I hope your answers help me out here. (-:

Thanks in advance for your answers.

Hi CHHag,

I am another user, not from support, but I had similar desires to you, and I think it is more a question of design philosophy vs. functionality. I found ways to make the structure do what I wanted, not sure if it will help, but I’ll share my experience.

First, for the text between galleries on a page or between images in a gallery, it seems desirable, but once you look at your webpage in editor, you see obviously it could never do that. Your basic page says:

Hi this is a gallery

(code to insert gallery)

Thanks for viewing

While it “looks” like a page when you’re done, of course it isn’t — the page as you see it doesn’t really exist. It’s “generated” when it loads. Put differently, you’re saying “Hi, (insert database query results), Thanks”. To do what you suggest would mean having to say “Hi, (insert partial results), new text (insert more results),” etc. If that is what you want, you CAN do it, but you have to tell NGG which results you want and where…you can, for example:

a. Insert an image from the gallery one by one and add text between, around, before, etc. I do this with a bunch of blog posts…a gallery has all the images together and I *could* insert the gallery at the top, but instead, I just type my text, insert an image where I want it, and move on.

https://polywogg.ca/monday-memories-sunsets/

This is a rudimentary example, but those handful of images are a subset from a larger gallery of 20-30 photos, individually inserted so I could put text wherever I want around it. As an aside, I also use NextGEN Gallery Image Chooser as a separate plugin (not made by NGG) that makes it easier to insert single images quickly. It is a bit simpler interface to generate the insert code faster than NGG’s menu system does.

b. Insert subsets of gallery images — when you go to insert Gallery A, for instance, you can tell it to insert all of Gallery A by default or you could click on the third tab of “gallery insert” where it has an option to include/exclude images, pick the first four or five, insert the gallery, type your text, and then insert Gallery A a second time, pick a different subset of images, type some more text, etc. It could look like 2+ mini-galleries even though it would all be from the same gallery (this is the example I used above — “HI (insert subset) text (insert 2nd subset) text”).

It works for me, and is closer to the functionality I want.

A third “option”, and not one I think is great, is to generate the page with all the images, get it looking exactly how you want it, open up the developer tab in your browser (Firefox, Chrome, IE, etc. all have something similar) so you can see all the raw code, copy the code and paste it into a new page in WP. It’s pretty clunky to do that, but it would give you ALL the images and then you could just put text wherever you want. Some professional coders used to do that with programs like Front Page — they would generate the basic page structure code using the editor, maybe with complicated table layouts, and then copy the code into a separate editor, play with it, and then publish an HTML page. It wasn’t really using Front Page or the offline editor to do it, it was just a starting point to avoid having to manually code everything. Not recommended, but you *could* do it. Huge amount of extra work, lots of extra code, no easy way to cascade changes later, BUT maximum flex for each page.

For your breadcrumbs, I had a similar issue, but I think mine was a more obvious “design flaw” on my part. If I go to a page that has, say, 3 galleries on it…which breadcrumb should it show if I go down a page and come back up? If I generate a page that is an album of an album of an album of an album of galleries, it will work just fine — because all of the chain was generated by the NGG system. But if I manually create one of those pages to give myself extra styling options, it would look like: Album / manual page / galleries; then when you click the manual page, it won’t understand the structure because you manually jumped out of it.

I got around this, but did so deliberately as I didn’t like the look and feel of the URLs when people were in sub-generated pages. Put differently, if NGG generates a page as if it is navigating the tree, then you have little control over how that page looks — can’t add much of anything to it because the page doesn’t really exist. If you insert an ALBUM A of albums B, C, D, and you click first on A and then on B, C, or D, *that* page doesn’t really exist. It just is generated by the first page. So there is no page D by default to edit. The bonus is that the breadcrumbs work just fine, the bad side is that there is not much you can do to style that page or add text.

My alternate design philosophy was to make every gallery and album have its own page. So:

ALBUM A — Page A
SUB-ALBUM B — PAGE B
SUB-ALBUM C — PAGE C
SUB-ALBUM D — PAGE D
GALLERY X — PAGE X
GALLERY Y — PAGE Y
GALLERY Z — PAGE Z

PAGE A shows album A with three sub-albums B, C, and D. It is only one level so I can basically do what I want with the page at the top and bottom. I *could* insert the galleries three times, but no real need, it’s an index page. When I click on D, it takes me to a separate page that is almost identical … it is a page just to handle Album D which has galleries x, y, z. I can style that page however I want.

The downside? You lose the automatic breadcrumbs. Because you’re not having NGG generate the pages, you get REAL pages to edit. And you can tell NGG if you click on Gallery X, it should take you to PAGE X and nothing else. This actually gives a bit of security. I opted out of the self-generated pages because I have a few private albums I didn’t want it to show. Nothing particularly secretive, they could be found by searching, but they have, say, a group of images from a wedding and I want only the guests to see those with a password. NGG doesn’t include security locks for galleries, you have to do that with a page, so I couldn’t let NGG generate index all the time or it would allow someone to navigate to that gallery (it would show up in the index). Instead, I make it so if someone DOES click on that gallery, it takes them to PAGE X (for example) and page X has WP page security on it (a password for example). But, as I said, I lose automatic breadcrumbs to do that. As a result, I inserted my own bread crumb, similar styling. My site is organized chronologically (THEME / YEAR / MONTH / EVENT) so when I’m doing a bunch of monthly or event galleries in a year, all the breadcrumbs are the same (it links to the year above), so I just set it up once for January and copying the link works the same for the rest of the year.

Here’s an example of my main gallery page:

https://polywogg.ca/pandafamilygallery/

It’s not finished yet, another 12 years to go and some indexing, a few albums to put in albums, or galleries to put into albums, but the breadcrumbs work fine, albeit manually. Of course, while all that above control is great, and I can program manual breadcrumbs, if I suddenly decided to re-structure the overall gallery, those breadcrumbs would all need to be manually edited. I got a lot more control out of doing it manually, but also less structural flexibility later.

I don’t know if that helps. The more I use it, the more I see what it can do, and most of it is just finding the exact structure that works between NGG defaults and user tweaks.

Good luck,

Paul
aka PolyWogg

Hello @chhag,

Thank you so much for your feedback.
Indeed it seems that you found a workaround to your requirement.
We already added this particular new album design as a feature request to be reviewed by our developers. Please keep in mind that our developers need to address these new features in order of priority. We don’t have an estimated time of release, that will depend on our Product Owner’s vision of our product.

As for the breadcrumbs, those are automatically generated once you include an album inside a page. Feel free to add any new requirements or features using this form: https://www.imagely.com/feature-voting/

Many thanks!

First of all, I want to thank Paul (PolyWogg) for the time taken to answer to my issues so elaborately.
I am still in the phase of looking what plugins I want to buy into, and NextGEN looks fine. But I just could not create what I think is quite a straightforward layout.
With your replies it seems like I will have to make some choices, because apparently I cannot have all that I would like to have (isn’t that just like in real life (-: ).
I will try this all out and see what I like best.

And I want to also thank gabyimagely for the reply.
I do hope that the functionality of NextGEN could in the (near…?) future include these features for both correct and complete breadcrumbs and also for some flexibility in layout of an “album of albums”.

Hope it helped. I forgot to mention that I have seen another solution, but it isn’t exactly “normal” so I hesitated to mention it. Sooo, let’s say you want an ALBUM to show:

INTRO TEXT
GALLERY A
MIDDLE TEXT
GALLERY B
END TEXT

A little basic, but the structure can be longer. You could create two “odd” options that solve your layout problem somewhat.

First, you could create an album with five galleries:

– Empty gallery 1 — with the intro text as the description;
– Gallery A
– Empty gallery 2 — with the middle text as the description;
– Gallery B
– Empty gallery 3 — with the end text as the description.

I used to use another gallery that was standalone, and lots of people created “spacer” galleries with no images in them so the descriptions broke it up. Kind of “odd” as I said, and styling can be challenging, but it CAN be done.

An even “odder” solution is for you to use something like Powerpoint or GIMP to create pic files with just text on it, like the Intro Text, and then add that image to your gallery. Then, the text doesn’t go in the description, it just appears a photo. If you use a layout with no border around the pic, and choose a font and size that meshes well with your theme, you would see:

Pic 1 (actually text but with no border, you can’t “see” that it’s not just text)
Pic 2
Pic 3 (medium text)
Pic 4
Pic 5 (end text).

The tool I used before had VERY limited text options for pages in certain themes, and people bypassed it by making pics of text. Some made it look identical to a similar page in WordPress. A little more elaborate, but does allow you to merge text and pics really easily. Just a thought…however, if you use option 2 over option 1, the text is all “graphics” which means it isn’t searchable as text on your site.

Paul

Thank you very much again, Paul!

I will try out all your suggestions to see how they all look.

I just hope that the breadcrumbs will work completely and correctly in (at least) one of these methods you so kindly described.

At this point I am under the impression that NextGEN is rather limited where breadcrumbs are concerned. It only works on albums and not on galleries, while the latter are ALWAYS used when images are the main topic and albums not always. No doubt it is technically a bit easier to implement for ‘albums’, but still.

And I also installed the plugin YOAST SEO, just for the breadcrumbs. Yoast SEO is a bit better, but with albums NextGEN and Yoast SEO do not seem to cooperate seamlessly to generate breadcrumbs that are correct and complete.

So at this point in time I feel that the only solution to get one complete and correct breadcrumb for the structure like:
Overview Page
– Year 2017
— Gallery1
— Gallery2
— Gallery3
– Year 2018
— Gallery4
— Gallery5
— Gallery6
– Year 2019
— Gallery7
— Gallery8
— Gallery9
is to make separate pages for the 3 “Year 20xx” and all the “Galleryn”.

And just ignore NextGEN’s ‘albums’ alltogether since there is no solution from within NextGEN for breadcrumbs. This is a pity because ‘albums’ let you work easily. But if they do not support the required functionality, then easy of use has no meaning (these days breadcrumbs are quite basic, right).

• This reply was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by chhag.

I mostly agree with you, but it is because you are doing a trade-off:

a. If you use NGG to generate the pages, the breadcrumbs work perfectly (album to album to album to gallery), BUT you can style the individual pages within that hierarchy.

b. If you use WP to style individual pages, then they aren’t really an NGG hierarchy anymore and of course the breadcrumbs don’t work.

I do know there are some “pages” plugins that allow you to do nested pages with breadcrumbs (i.e. using pages not posts). Not really my structure so I don’t do it that way.

Good luck!

Paul