Works and great support!

Update 05/31 v3.4.2:

After trying many gallery plug-ins with WordPress 4.x, I ended up using Jetpack’s Tiled Galleries with photon active, no carousel, a simple – easy to style – lightbox and quite some additional CSS to make it all look right. I was more or less satisfied. And then came WordPress 5 came around the corner, with Gutenberg, without Jetpack’s CDN being ready. Goodbye properly aligned galleries and fast loading of images.

My site being all about images, once again, I needed to find a gallery and lightbox combination that just worked.

Enter Meow gallery and Meow Lightbox. Well, almost. I could not get the lightbox to work properly, but given that inside a Virtual Machine test site, the combination works flawlessly, I am sure that has something to do with the theme I am using.

About the gallery plug-in:
It is the first one that actually worked with the new block editor, so I decided to stick with it. The support is simply fantastic. The few issues I had, got solved really fast and the author tried everything to get the lightbox to work with my crappy theme.

Sometimes there is an issue where one photo sticks out of the gallery a bit. It was more or less fixed, but still raises its stubborn head now and then. Usually though, I’m able to fix it by moving a few pictures around a bit in the gallery. Sometimes it takes two such actions, and then the gallery behaves. It’s weird, it’s not perfect – but I can live it.

In the meantime, the issue of the one picture left behind on the final row using Tiles Layout has been fixed.

This latest version should work with the default WordPress gallery shortcode, which is something I haven’t tried yet but I definitely will, because I am also using the Media Library Assistant plug-in and with that one it’s possible to create galleries based on tags. The thick plottens!

v3.3.7:
I was just about to write a review about this plug-in when I saw there was an update available (3.3.8). The changelog said “Update: Avoid having one photo left alone when using the Tiles Layout.”

And that was pretty much the only complaint I had about this gallery block plug-in I had. Yesterday I was trying to make two galleries in one article look better, and I just couldn’t.

Now, I know that the theme I’m using is not following all the best practices, and each server environment is different, so maybe that’s where the issue really is hiding.

Four stars, because there is always something to improve.

• This topic was modified 5 years, 12 months ago by Jan Dembowski. Reason: Removed link
• This topic was modified 5 years, 9 months ago by Blamedutchie. Reason: updated with info on the latest version