Global Gallery

On first plugin's activation, it must be activated in order to work.
Head to the LCweb Dashboard page: it contains the summary of all LCweb products with useful links and their validation forms.

LCweb Shop License:

Your license is automatically registered into the LCweb database, you only need to

1. go to your licenses dashboard and select the section your product belongs to (if you own only one product, you will be automatically moved)
2. Scroll down until you find the license you want to use for the website and click on the pencil button
3. Insert the website domain and save. The system will give you the activation token
4. Copy and paste it into the LCweb dashboard, on your website

Envato Marketplace License:

In this case you need to manually register on the LCweb Licenses Hub

1. Go to the LCweb Licenses Hub and, if you never registered, do it. You will have to validate your e-mail and use a login token in order to enter.
2. Once you are in, select the section your product belongs to (if you own only one product, you will be automatically moved)
3. Scroll down until you find the product and click on the PLUS button. A form will prompt you to enter the Envato purchase code (how to get it?) and the website domain
4. Once saved, the system will give you the activation token
5. Copy and paste it into the LCweb dashboard, on your website

The first step in order to use the plugin is check and save settings.
They are arranged and split to be as easy as possible to be configured. Each field has got its description giving contextual help.

Various parts are going to be analysed through this documentation chapters.
On the very first installation there are three essential parts to check:

Elements maximum width

Is the variable used to calculate thumbnail sizes. Is important to set it properly, using the real maximum width where you're gonna place Global Gallery elements.

To avoid huge images by default it is set to 1200 pixels, but if you are using (for example) a fullwidth template, the proper value will be 1920px.

Layouts Section

Here you setup global gallery shapes for every layout. Image sizes can be changed individually (in gallery builder) while margins are fixed.

Is also important to understand how percentage height works (eg. for collection image): it is always referred to images width.
For example if they are 200px wide and you set an height of 50%, resulting images will be 100px high

Styling Section

It controls everything about galleries aspect: from overlays to filters.
You can take advantage of the 8 preset styles though: using them you'll override every styling option.

Additional Notes

Use thumbnails on admin side?

Global Gallery, by default, disables thumbnails on admin panel. This to avoid server overloads, specially on large galleries.
Enable it if your server is powerful or using few images per gallery.

Use javascript in website's head?

Use this only if you are noticing some incompatibility

RTL mode?

Option to be used on RTL websites (for example hebrew ones)

Before creating galleries you may create categories to be assigned later.
They are optional and used by gallery collections.

This is a files manager directly connected with your server folders. A quick and clean alternative to FTP usage in order to use Global Gallery albums source. As first, the base folder must be defined.
NB: only site administrators will be able to configure it for security reasons

The suggested (and auto-configured) path is a specific folder within wp-content/uploads WordPress directory.
Subfolders and images will be uploaded in there.

Once the system is ready, you need to create subfolders, that will represent galleries.
Folders name must be server-proof. This means you must use only letters, numbers, hyphens and underscores.

Therefore select the folder you want to operate on and just upload your images by clicking the "upload images" button or dragging them on the screen.

The engine is able to read IPTC meta tags. The tags scheme is set on globally used fields (for example, what Photoshop and Lightroom use). There is no database, everything you see and edit is directly reflected on the physical server file. This means you can also use a third part automated FTP system to upload images in a specific folder and use this files manager to add/edit/remove images data.

In following sub-chapters you will learn how to create galleries using various sources.
However there are some common notes applying globally:

Desktop-like images selection

Remember you can bulk-select multiple images simply keeping the mouse clicked. As you'd do on your desktop

Thumbnails center

Every image added to the gallery has got a command to set its thumbnail's center

Easy-sorting mode

Sorting images could be a pain, specially if you have large galleries.
In builder's right column there's the "Easy sorting mode" button, changing builder's layout to be easier sorted.

Images link

You can turn gallery images in links. Linked images won't be opened in lightboxes.
Links behavior is set globally, in settings.

Images frontend sorting

Is also possible to set a custom sorting for frontend images sorting.
Please note date sorting is available only for WP-based sources since bases onn images ID.

Gallery preview

Gallery must be saved before checking its preview

Each gallery image can be tagged: insert comma split tags in the related field and they will be used to setup a filtering system.
Please note this feature is not available for auto-populated galleries, since requires a manual immission.

Once saved, be sure to have filters enabled in the Gallery Shortcode (check the related documentation's chapter to know more) and you will see those tags grouped and appearing on top of the gallery images.

There are several tag aspects that can be managed in plugin settings: for example their sorting method or whether to show matched images count or also whether to ignore tags matching very few images (to avoid too many tag buttons).

You can wrap existing galleries into collections: a smart and quick way to group and filter them in a unique context.

1. Click on a gallery image to add it to the collection
2. You can optionally set it to have random images, display tags, search bar or also show watermarked images
3. Optionally you may also link the gallery thumbnail. Obviously linked galleries won't bring to their images
4. Also description is optional. It may contain HTML and the %IMG-NUM% placeholder, showing gallery images count
5. By default the collection shows the first gallery image on its intial state. However you can also set a custom picture to represent the gallery

Global Gallery offers you many lightboxes to display your images with.
Into settings, there's a specific tab to choose the one to be used and, accordingly to your choice, customization fields will be shown.

Lightboxes list:

• LC-lightbox
• PhotoSwipe
• Lightcase
• Simple Lightbox
• Magnific Popup
• imageLightbox
• Photobox

LC-Lightbox Comments

Supported systems are Disqus and Facebook Comments

Disqus

Integration is really simple: just insert the shortname. Style, moderation and details are managed directly on Disqus

Facebook Comments

This requires multiple steps and more skills:

• create a new app and paste its ID into the related field
• Global Gallery inserts the Facebook meta into the website to link comments to your app
• before launching comments, be sure to have set moderators here clicking on "settings"
  

• If everything is ok, moderators will see the moderation label on top of comments form and you will receive notifications through the app

For any other builder or using the old WordPress editor:

In plugin settings you find a related tab where to setup watermark:

A quick note about proportional sizing: if checked, watermark size will be adjusted to matched the image to affect.
For example if image is 1000x1000 pixels and you set a proportional image of 15% x 15%, the watermark will be 150x150 pixels.

Is extremely useful to avoid bad results using images having various aspect ratios and sizes.

Once setup you will be able to use the watermark option in shortcodes.
However is strictly recommended to create the watermark cache for the gallery we're going to use.

In fact, in every gallery builder, there's a big button to do so. In the right sidebar

Global Gallery can create an XML sitemap containing your gallery images.
Don't know what a sitemap is? Essentially you can use it to push images URL and data directly to search engines, in order to have them indexed faster. Here's a Google guide.

The sitemap URL is written into plugin settings > Main Options > first section. Generally is:
THE-SITE-URL/wp-content/plugins/global-gallery/galleries_xml_sitemap.php

It will be populated by galleries using self-hosted images (eg. WP library, NextGen, local folders).
Search engines will only accept contents coming from your site URL.

There's only a requirement: you must fill the "Page URL for Sitemap" in each gallery builder (right sidebar).
It is mandatory in order to suggest to search engines where images can be found.

The plugin is 100% multilanguage for both front and back ends. If a translation of your language has been created, WordPress will automatically switch between languages.

How to create a translation

If you have WPML + String Translation add-on or Polylang, you can simply scan the plugin and translate strings via its UI.

Otherwise: go in the plugin folder, then open the one named "languages" or "lang_admin".
Inside you'll find the default.pot file. It contains english strings to be translated.

If you want to create or customize one your language translation, follow these steps:

1. Open the default.pot file with POedit
2. Edit the catalog by inserting your data and setting translation's language
3. Save the file with your language's i18n identifier and "gg_ml-" prefix (the italian example is gg_ml-it_IT)
4. Go to plugin's folder ".. wp-content/plugins/global-gallery/languages" or ".. wp-content/plugins/global-gallery/lang_admin" and paste resulting .PO and .MO files

If you create new translations, please contact me at [email protected] sending your .PO and .MO files.
Otherwise they will be lost in next updates. Thanks!