Custom Template to link to a specific URL upon image click

I’ve tried your template and it is working correctly for me; is there a specific warning or error being emitted that you are seeing with your template?

Thanks for your reply! It is not crashing, no warning, but it is not functioning as intended i.e. not linking to the url of a different page inserted in the image description field, it simply goes to an imagebrowser of the gallery, so somehow my redirection through imageURL to a custom URL is not happening. Sorry I can’t give you a real link to see it not working as right now I’m back to v2.0.66… But here is an example link I have in the description field of one of the images of the gallery using this template: https://www.dendesignery.com/adaptable-room-design/. Upon image click it should go to that page, and it does not as of v2.0.7*…..

Could you check the ‘Gallery Settings’ page and look for the “Use imagebrowser effect” setting in the “NextGEN Basic Thumbnails” accordion? It sounds like that option is on.

If you would like to leave it on except for this gallery you could add use_imagebrowser_effect=’0′ to your shortcode.

Yes, “Use imagebrowser effect” is on. But it causes no trouble in v2.0.66. Do you think it would for some reason with the upgrade? I had not changed any settings after the upgrade to v2.0.7*.

I believe we fixed a bug related to the imagebrowser effect not being applied correctly to custom templates, it may be that you were unintentionally benefiting from our earlier mistake.

Oh, I see… kind of. So what should do them?

Meant to say what should I do then?

You could either disable that setting in the “Gallery Settings” page to disable that effect sitewide, or if you want to preserve it everywhere but certain galleries you can add use_imagebrowser_effect='0' to their shortcode.

Sorry for being slow in responding, had to pick the time to test it in case the new version was to give me trouble again…. So I was upgraded to *.76, and said “no” to imagebrowser sitewide through “Gallery Settings” per your suggestion. Unfortunately that did not solve it. Now I am simply seeing a white lightbox with the caption at top. It does not link to the other page as it should…. I have a screen shot, not sure how to show it to you…..

Went to read how to show the screenshot, so here it is:
https://www.dendesignery.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/did-not-link-to-page.png. Thanks for looking into this.

We’ve released 2.0.77 which includes a fix for custom templates not working correctly with lightboxes & the imagebrowser effect; it should finally fix this last issue.

So sorry for the number of problems, this is hopefully the last we’ll need to touch either of these parts of the plugin for a while ??

I just tried with version *.77, and I hate to bring bad news, but I am getting the exact same thing – the white lightbox….. with both my custom templates that link to URL, the one I showed you the code for in the first post, and another one that uses the alttext field to read the url from. Here is the code for the second one, in case you’d like to see, but the changes I made are obviously very minor:

<?php
/**
Template Page for the gallery overview

Follow variables are useable :

	$gallery     : Contain all about the gallery
	$images      : Contain all images, path, title
	$pagination  : Contain the pagination content

 You can check the content when you insert the tag <?php var_dump($variable) ?>
 If you would like to show the timestamp of the image ,you can use <?php echo $exif['created_timestamp'] ?>
**/
?>
<?php if (!defined ('ABSPATH')) die ('No direct access allowed'); ?><?php if (!empty ($gallery)) : ?>

<div class="ngg-galleryoverview ngg-template-caption" id="<?php echo $gallery->anchor ?>">

<?php if ($gallery->show_slideshow) { ?>
	<!-- Slideshow link -->
	<div class="slideshowlink">
		<a class="slideshowlink" href="<?php echo nextgen_esc_url($gallery->slideshow_link) ?>">
			<?php echo $gallery->slideshow_link_text ?>
		</a>
	</div>
<?php } ?>

<?php if ($gallery->show_piclens) { ?>
	<!-- Piclense link -->
	<div class="piclenselink">
		<a class="piclenselink" href="<?php echo nextgen_esc_url($gallery->piclens_link) ?>">
			<?php _e('[View with PicLens]','nggallery'); ?>
		</a>
	</div>
<?php } ?>

	<!-- Thumbnails -->
	<?php foreach ( $images as $image ) : ?>

	<div id="ngg-image-<?php echo $image->pid ?>" class="ngg-gallery-thumbnail-box" <?php echo $image->style ?> >
		<div class="ngg-gallery-thumbnail" >
			<a href="<?php echo $image->alttext ?>" title="<?php echo $image->description ?>" <?php echo $image->thumbcode ?> >
				<?php if ( !$image->hidden ) { ?>
				<img title="<?php echo $image->description ?>" alt="<?php echo $image->description ?>" src="<?php echo $image->thumbnailURL ?>" <?php echo $image->size ?> />
				<?php } ?>
			</a>
			<span><?php echo $image->description ?></span>
		</div>
	</div>
	<?php if ( $image->hidden ) continue; ?>
	<?php if ( $gallery->columns > 0 && ++$i % $gallery->columns == 0 ) { ?>
	<br style="clear: both" />
	<?php } ?>
 	<?php endforeach; ?>

	<!-- Pagination -->
 	<?php echo $pagination ?>

</div>

<?php endif; ?>

You can prevent NextGen from attaching any lightbox effects to images with your template by removing <?php echo $image->thumbcode ?> which should solve that problem. All it does is inject a CSS class to mark the image as being loadable with that lightbox, and sometimes some additional code (like data- attributes or rel=..) to group images from the same gallery together.

Thank you! This solved my custom templates problem.

But now I’m having a different problem, I get the lightbox in other cases where before it used to open another page with the larger image, I think this is now happening with all of the non-custom templates, and single pic as well. The lightbox does not look great (has 2 Close buttons for some reason – one at top left and one at bottom right), and it does not show the larger image size (which is what need). I did try to adjust some settings but keep getting the same thing, and in one case got a duplicate caption display under the thumb for some reason….. Any ideas? Should I have to remove that code from every template, not sure?

So I think I solved my problem, set Lightbox Effects to “None” in “Other Settings”. Not sure why I needed to do this going from the the previous version to the latest, did v2.0.77 change that setting somehow upon installing itself?