mbsharp

There are two formats for showing albums on the page – basic and extended. I use extended and it shows one row per gallery in the album with a title and an indicative image (chosen during gallery management). Clicking on a gallery shows that gallery (not multiple galleries) in your chosen format eg, basic thumbnails.

You are right that version 3.0.15 introduced a new way of selecting random images, which appears to affect both shortcode on pages and the widget. That new method doesn’t work in that it selects no images or not the requested number of images.

There is a fix in testing which will hopefully sort this out, although it is taking some time.

There is currently a problem with ‘random’ as a setting for galleries and widgets. Basically, random doesn’t select images properly or in the quantities requested. The fix appears to be in testing at the moment and should come along shortly. When it does, each random selection will remain in place for 24h before being refreshed.

I have rechecked how the gallery fields are populated, and there is a minor change from my previous statement.

Gallery Management has two boxes under the heading ALT & TITLE TEXT / DESCRIPTION. The upper box is the Alt field and the lower box is the Title field. There is a third box for Keywords (or Tags).

The Alt field has three possible sources. First choice is taken from IPTC > Status > Title. If the first choice source is null, the second choice is taken from IPTC > Content > Description. If both those choices are null then the final choice is to use the file name offered for upload.
The Title field is taken from IPTC > Content > Description (if anything).
The Keywords field is taken from IPTC > Content > Keywords (if anything).

That does mean that if the IPTC > Status > Title field is null and the IPTC > Content > Description has data, which is the case for images in your GDSF 2007 gallery, then both the Alt and Title fields will be filled with the same content.

The Alt field is displayed on hover over the thumbnail, and the Title field is displayed with the full-size image. In your GDSF 2007 gallery, both fields have the same content, and both text displays are therefore the same.

That’s the automated filling of those fields. If that s not what you want to see, then the fields must be manually edited in gallery management.

I have found a gallery with your problem. See Great Dorset Steam Fair 2007. Many of the images show ‘KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA’ both on hover and with the full-size image.

I recovered one image “GDSF 2007. Picture 1 001.jpg” and examined it. The file has the Konica text in the IPTC Description field. As noted before, some cameras do this. This example is a MINOLTA DYNAX 5, the others I have seen are for OLYMPUS.

If you look at this image in gallery management for this gallery (GDSF 2007), I think you will find both the Alt and Title fields show the Konica text.

I admit to being slightly puzzled because the IPTC>Status>Title field is blank in this image file. My review of how Nextgen fields are populated goes back to 2015 and there may have been a slight change since then. But the principle remains the same. The hover text is whatever is in the Alt field.

I had a look at your site and the gallery mentioned.

In all the galleries I checked, and it was quite a few, it looked like your original filename is displayed on hover. If you compare that display with the source file in the browser status bar, you can see that the stored filename is usually different because blanks are filled with ‘-‘ and brackets are removed. So the display is of your original name and the stored name has been made cross-server compatible.

What I couldn’t find is any images in any galleries which did not show your filename. Perhaps you can indicate where I could look.

PS (again)
Changing the filename of your images before upload will not make any difference. If the file contains IPTC Title data, that will always be used in the Alt field.

We need to distinguish between the filename of the image file offered for upload and the filename used to store the image in the Nextgen upload folders: the stored filename may be different if Nextgen has to change special characters and/or avoid duplication.

The Alt property of the HTML tag has always been used as an option to display a text label for an image file. It was intended so that browsers need not necessarily download the image itself, especially if the file is large. Hence, ‘Alt’ is the name of the field in Nextgen gallery management which is displayed when you hover over a thumbnail image.

As explained before, Nextgen populates the Alt field with the IPTC Title data, OR with the filename only if there is no IPTC Title data. It is slightly confusing that Nextgen also has a Title field (from IPTC Description) for each image which appears under the image when it is shown full size.

Rather than just saying that one gallery shows filename on hover and another does not, can you look in gallery management for both and compare the contents of the Alt fields. You should find that the text shown is always the Alt field content.

As the Alt display is on an image by image basis, the sort order of a gallery should not be relevant.

PS. Olympus cameras a particularly annoying in putting OLYMPUS in the IPTC Title field. That may be an example of your original description of the camera ID appearing.

Obviously I am not Imagely, but I have an interest in displaying photographs.

There is a filename of every image, of course. But the gallery display does not, and never has displayed the filename. What the gallery displays when you hover over the thumbnail image is whatever is in the Alt field. As I noted above, the Alt field is populated at image upload time using IPTC metadata if any is available, or otherwise by the filename.
As it happens, I use file names which do credit the author, so having IPTC metadata prevent that from loading into the Alt field is an annoyance which I just have to manage. On balance it is easier for me to edit a few Alt fields in gallery management than to destroy the IPTC data in all files before upload.
There are EXIF/IPTC editors which can be used before upload, but really you should retain metadata if the photographer has provided it.

In a way, I agree with you that I would like to have the filename populate the Alt field, but on balance that’s not the best idea.

The Alt field is populated from IPTC>Status>Title. If that’s blank it uses the filename
The Title field is populated from IPTC>Content>Description. (or blank)
The Tags field is populated from IPTC>Content>Keywords. (or blank)

So the gallery fields are filled from IPTC metadata which preserves what is known and provided by the originator or subsequent editor. That supports image attribution, as it should.

Likewise, my hosting provider supports RAND() and ORDER BY RAND() and I tested it manually. For those who don’t know, RAND() adds a random number field to an SQL query output, and ORDER BY RAND() therefore sorts the query output randomly.

There are now numerous reports of this same issue, and they need to be treated seriously, and not referred back for unlikely local hosting configurations.

The form was filled in and additional information was provided as requested. A support ticket was created on the Imagely site.

As can be seen from later reports, there are many others reporting essentially the same issue. I am therefore puzzled why the support ticket was closed, and I have reactivated it.

I definitely support this ‘complaint’. A very important feature of the previous, and long-standing, practice was that the random image(s) changed on every page load.

There are two issues. One, that the random function doesn’t work by selecting the correct number of images requested. Two, that whatever selection does get made is retained at all. Both need fixing.

This appears to be the same issue as reported by several others. My own report has been under investigation for several days, so hopefully it will get fixed.
I suspect the issue arose in 3.0.15 (see changelog bullet 3), where a new method of choosing random images is described including holding the selection for 24h. Both the non-working method and the retention of the selection differ from previous practice.