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You could even create a gallery of sorts from regular posts with their featured images. Instead of the archive page listing text excerpts, it can simply output a thumbnail of the post’s featured image. It’ll take some customizing of your theme. Depending on how your theme currently manages featured images, the custom work may not be all that involved.
With either scheme, a custom pagination function could be created that displays small thumbnail links to other pages of the gallery. Users would not even need the main thumbnails page this way, except when they would want a complete overview.
]]>This is a huge problem with the current Photo Gallery by WD plugin. No matter how much information I enter for the photo, Google cannot index that associated data for the photo, because it is not physically on screen with the photo. The information is stored somewhere in a database within the plugin and the plugin only brings up the information when it is called for by a user interaction with the photo.
I think the same is true for the Picture Overlay plugin. The information is only accessed when a user hovers over the photo, so it is not available to be indexed by a search engine. This is a problem I have found with most photo gallery plugins I have looked at. They are great for displaying images, but they are horrible at search engine optimization. Search engines are TEXT base, not image based. There needs to be text that is directly connected to the image so that google can index the image. If the text is stored in some plugin directory, google does not know that it is associated with the image.
]]>If I could find a plugin that is like this as far as the thumbnails being up top and the main picture below goes, but I want to the TEXT to be below the image completely off of it.
]]>You said: “You could even create a gallery of sorts from regular posts with their featured images.”
You Said: “With either scheme, a custom pagination function could be created that displays small thumbnail links to other pages of the gallery”
My current theme is VANTAGE. Can I do what you suggested with the VANTAGE theme?
]]>I can’t see how I can use this Pagination function to create a PAGE based Slider across the top of a CHILD level Photo Gallery.
All I want is a SLIDER at the top of my page which displays a scrollable list of thumbnails which when selected present the new page below the Slider. In the past, this could easily be done using a FRAMES based page. I just don’t know how to do this in WP.
]]>Based on your recent posts, I get the sense that creating such a scheme is beyond your abilities, but the fact you’re willing to give it a go if there were a tutorial tells me you are ambitious. I appreciate that, I’m sorry I don’t know of any such tutorial.
I think you might be mistaken about what text search bots can find on a slider. Text does not need to be visible on screen for bots to see it. As you observed, they are text based. They generally don’t bother to check CSS to see if an element is visible or not. If it’s part of the DOM, it’s read. Typically, overlay text and other such modal displays are part of the DOM from the start, it is merely hidden until some user action occurs. It is entirely possible that some plugins do as you suggest and query the DB for every user action, but that would be more the exception than the rule. It doesn’t make sense to make Ajax requests for relatively minor amounts of text whose content is known from the start. Usually Ajax is used for content resulting from user data input (not just action) or for loading large amounts of data (i.e. lazy loading).
Have you evaluated how the plugins manage data by its on-screen behavior or by examining the page source? If not the latter, perhaps you need to re-evaluate the plugins.
The sort of presentation you describe causes me to think of WooThemes Flexslider. They sell a WP Flexslider plugin, but the free download is adequate if you know how to integrate JavaScript into WP. The drawback is there is no backend user interface, the underlying HTML needs to be either manually created or dynamically created by custom template code. Whether the commercial plugin offers more, I couldn’t say. I only have used the free JS download.
On the linked example page, the main slider and thumbnail row are separate HTML entities, you can place them anywhere on a page you like in any order. The main slider can accommodate captions of any kind and size, but you would need to adjust the page’s CSS to get the actual appearance you want. All you are really getting is the JS engine and some sample code.
]]>Here is the sample page. This is what I want it to look like.
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