Using own lightbox

ARI provides the ability to edit CSS

I was hoping you would bring this up. I stopped adding CSS options to Photonic after WP offered a native solution: you can add any custom CSS you want to Appearance → Customize → Additional CSS. This works regardless of theme or plugin, and saves some plugin-bloat. Based on my 8 years with Photonic people very rarely wish to change the default settings, and when they do, I offer them the 3-5 lines via this forum. Do you need such help?

as well as move icons around

Didn’t quite follow this one. Move icons where? I did install the plugin, but I see no such option. ARI seems to offer options to simply say which buttons you want, that’s all (Photonic does this too).

also allows a larger integration of social media links

It looks like it offers Google+ (I had it too – Google+ was shut down a couple of months back, so I removed it), LinkedIn and VKontakte. Admittedly I have never had LinkedIn or VKontakte. Are these mission-critical? Generally I have not seen anything other than Twitter, FB or Pinterest being used for sharing photos, hence the question.

An option that I also use is the ability to group non-gallery media together into one lightbox

This actually works with Photonic too, but in a slightly different way. I believe ARI asks you to set a “class” on the images you want to group, and then you specify the class in ARI’s options. With Photonic you can directly specify the group in your markup. E.g.:

<a href='image1.jpg' data-fancybox='group1'><img src='image1-thumb.jpg' /></a>
<a href='image2.jpg' data-fancybox='group1'><img src='image2-thumb.jpg' /></a>

<a href='image3.jpg' data-fancybox='group2'><img src='image3-thumb.jpg' /></a>
<a href='image4.jpg' data-fancybox='group2'><img src='image4-thumb.jpg' /></a>

I do understand if these are deal-breakers for you, though. As I mentioned in my very first response, it is not possible to use an external lightbox out of the box.

Of course, my other question remains: what is it that you are looking to do with Photonic that is not possible with your combination of plugins?

I also discovered that by using the back button from the “Pinterest” social link, the page is reloaded with the lightbox loading the selected image multiple times (once for each photo in the gallery). For example, my gallery had four images, and it loaded the lightbox over itself four times. I pressed escape four times, to close each lightbox.

This is happening due to multiple plugins running Fancybox3 on your site. Photonic assigns a unique “deep-link” to a photon in a gallery. This seems to be getting overwritten by ARI in your case. E.g. Photonic’s deep-link structure is gallery[photonic-wp-stream-xxxxx]/yyyyy/. Each photo is given a unique id. However, for your site the deep-link is coming out to be something like #!lightbox/188d37d7/The-King-and-I-Banner.png. This is because ARI is overwriting Photonic’s settings.

Where is the option to enable or disable the social media links? The Facebook one seems to spout back an error saying “invalid URL”.

Again, this is probably resulting from ARI overwriting Photonic’s settings, mostly due to the deep-link change I wrote about above. In the default use cases Photonic is able to go to Facebook with the image and page details.

Is there a way to group items together for items that are automatically generated. For example, I use “Folder Gallery” which dynamically creates a grid from a server folder. These galleries are grouped together using a <div> with the class “fg_gallery”. Is there a way to group these together into one lightbox automatically?

No, there isn’t. Is there a way that “Folder Gallery” lets you add a custom attribute to the markup? I ask because if a particular page has two instances of fg_gallery, won’t ARI pick up both of them and group them into one lightbox?

Bear in mind that Photonic’s design philosophy is focused on its own galleries, and native WP galleries not touched by other plugins – that way Photonic gives precedence to other lightbox plugins, with the expectation that they don’t touch Photonic’s galleries.

OK – I have found the issue with the FB URL. However I am not able to replicate the issue locally with Pinterest.

How did you create the Instagram gallery? Using Photonic? If you look at the demo site I have videos in my gallery (the first two are videos), and their thumbnails come across as images.

Does your lightbox play well with Jetpack?

Mostly yes, but I haven’t used JetPack for quite some time now, so I cannot say for sure. I recently helped out a user with using the “Performance” add-on (which is essentially JetPack Photon) with Photonic. Let me know if you run into any issues and I will try to help out.

I also seem to have to re-authenticate Instagram frequently by revoking access and then allowing access again. Is that an issue others are having?

No… I personally haven’t ever had to reauthenticate for Instagram, and I haven’t seen any support requests come through saying they were facing a problem with Instagram.