Backlight provides a way to embed structured data into your photo website that is used by Google Image to display photo licensing badges. This badges make it easier to find images available for commercial licensing. One of the fields to supply is the acquire license page. Backlight uses a dedicated page for that. When I […]
Adding Google Analytics GA4 to Backlight 4
Google introduced yet another tracking feature, called GA4, that provides more insights than what is currently available with their universal tracker. GA4 is not yet supported out of the box by Backlight 4, but using phplugins, it is easy to add to your own site. In order that this code works, you need to have […]
Embedding Photo Search Results
For a long time, I wanted to structure some of my albums based on search results instead of a fixed content. This would enable something like a smart album structure that supports themes (e.g. bridges, mountains, people, etc) where images are shown that are already published in another album. A week ago, Chumby asked the […]
Customizing Page Footer
Did you ever wonder how I created a page footer such as? With Backlight, there is only a limited number of options available to customize the page footer. But if that is not sufficient, then there is an alternative way by using the phplugins function footer_top(). With just a few lines of code in your […]
Using Backlight 3 JSON API from PHP, take 2
This is an update to my original post. It improves on error handling and has some other cosmetic changes. One of the new features of Backlight 3 is a JSON API. It is a standard REST API interface and is very easy to use. The documentation shows all the endpoints and provides even a JavaScript […]
Using dark-themed Google Recaptcha V2
To me, it is very annoying to have the bright Google Recaptcha V2 check on a dark background. With Backlight 3, I could move to Recaptcha V3 which doesn’t need human interaction, but with Backlight 2, this option is not available. Unfortunately, Backlight’s Designer doesn’t provide an option to select between light and dark themed […]
Adding keyboard support to single image pages
I love the single image page view since it supports customizations using phplugins. Unfortunately, navigation requires a mouse or a touchpad. But there is a fix for that! With some php and javascript magic, support for simple keyboard navigation can be added: Left key: previous image Right key: next image Escape key: go back to […]
Customizing search results
As many things with Backlight 2, the search page can be customized using CSS and phplugins. In this example, I removed the section headers and matching albums, and added a result count: Interested? Follow along and I show you how to get there! Hiding Album and Photos sections One regular request is to hide the […]
Page specific PHP code
Phplugins is very powerful as it can be used to customize your Backlight 2 based site to an extend not possible with the Backlight admin interface. Sometimes, it is not desired, that such a customization targets the entire site, but only a single page or a group of pages. In this short post, I show […]
Improving Navigation of Albums and AlbumSets
To navigate back from an album or an album-set to the parent album-set, I use either bookmarks or a keyboard shortcut (cmd-[ on my Mac). Or on my phone, it is a simple swipe from the left border of the LCD to the middle of the screen. But some users might be more familiar with […]
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