One of the hacks I put in place for my old site design showing image titles when you click on an image in the gallery. This isn’t out-of-the-box functionality for the NextGEN plugin; the description (which you set manually in the gallery manager) is populated, but the image title is not. The solution lies in modifying the title attribute of the a tag generated by gallery.php.

Caveats & Notes

• This works for the thickbox effect. I don’t know if will work for other effects.
• Directly editing the PHP files of plugins may cause problems when you update WordPress or the plugin itself. Do so at your own risk.
• The bold tags look great, but I’m not sure how compatible they are; your mileage may vary.
• Successfully tested on Firefox, IE8, Chrome (webkit).

PHP Code: Step 1

Find this code in wp-content/plugins/nextgen-gallery/view/gallery.php (line 38 in unmodified original version 1.3.5):

Add the following code after the lines above:

PHP Code: Step 2

Replace the following line (line 42):

With this:

Explanation

thickbox.js, a WordPress include, is the javascript that generates the image popup for NextGEN’s thickbox effect. It gets its information from the thumbnail href in the gallery and uses that information to populate picture data in the popup’s caption area beneath the picture. Specifically, the picture’s description is pulled from the title attribute of the image’s a tag which is, in turn, generated in gallery.php by the code above. Unmodified, the code only pulls the description, which you can set in the gallery manager area. By adding this code, you’re prepending the image name to the description and passing that to thickbox.js via the thumbnail title text. If no description is present, only the image title is passed to thickbox.

You can see how the new variable $newdesc can be manipulated to include any other data you want. For example, you could also append exif data and image size by appending $exif[‘created_timestamp’] and $image->size to $newdesc. To see what information is available to you, add the PHP function <?php var_dump($image) ?> inside the foreach loop and it will output all of the attributes of each image.

EXIF Update 11.19.2010

After some messing around, I’ve sorted out a way to access the EXIF data, since the method provided by the developer doesn’t work. Let me know how this goes for you. The new code required to add EXIF data is now included above. The sample EXIF data I appended to $newdesc on line 18 is the date information. Here is the key for other data:

• title: $pdata->get_META(‘title’)
• caption: $pdata->get_META(‘caption’)
• keywords: $pdata->get_META(‘keywords’)
• timestamp: $pdata->get_date_time()
• date stamp only: substr($pdata->get_date_time(),0,10)

Feel free to share any improvements, limitations, etc. in the comments.