photo albums

“modal portfolio gallery“? Modals overlay the main content in the same window. Popups open in a new window. They both serve similar purposes, but designers tend to favor modals over popups because they are less old school and don’t encounter the security issues we get with popups.

I included “portfolio” as a suggested search term because it sounds like you want a gallery of galleries. Where one of the initial thumbs takes us to a grid of thumbs for an individual gallery. In any case, the keywords chosen by plugin devs are ambiguous at best. The right search terms will still yield false positives. Sometimes the plugin description will be more informative, but you’ll need to try out a number of plugins to find one that you like.

Thankyou so much for your reply, I was beginning to give up on finding help.
I will try your suggestions but have tried so many gallery plugins I just don’t understand why they don’t use them this way. I found one that works how I wanted but it does not seem as though it is any longer supported. So to stop wasting time I thought that I could have a menu that shows the gallery say in a div and then when you press another menu button another gallery would show up in that same div. But of course I don’t know what that is called either, dynamic content, ajax, no idea and am having just as hard a time to find any plugins that do it. So with out knowing what it is called I cant find out how to do it, I have searched youtube google forums nothing. I have seen it in many places so I don’t see why it is so hard to find out what this technique is called. Any help again would be very much appreciated.
Also is there other places I should try for these questions?
Thank you

You’re right, what you describe is dynamic content via Ajax. I think that kind of mechanism will be even more difficult to find than the common click a link to get a new page scheme.

What if, using default WP resources, you created various gallery posts where all the images in the gallery are thumbs on the post’s page. Clicking a thumb either opens an attachment page or the large image file itself. You don’t get a lightbox effect by default, but that’s easier to add in than an entire portfolio system.

Place each of these posts in a common category. Requesting that category’s archive will thus list all the gallery posts available. The layout may not be desirable, but at least the information is all there. Depending on the theme, there ought to at least be a featured image and a title. Some additional CSS could hide undesired content and alter the layout to something more desirable, such as an image grid.

The other alternative would be to hire a coder to help you develop a bespoke solution. If there’s already an existing plugin that mostly meets your needs, the cost required to add in additional needs may not be all that expensive. If you don’t already know a coder, professional help can be found at resources like https://jobs.wordpress.net/ or https://jetpack.pro/.

There are other WordPress forums outside of www.ads-software.com, such as over at wordpress.stackexchange.com. However, that one in particular is more developer oriented, though it says it’s also for “administrators”, so I don’t think a question like yours is necessarily off limits.

bcworkz thank you for taking the time and effort to respond to me. It is really appreciated.