tillery

@edwinliuxd – I’m actually not quite sure why this isn’t working. I downloaded one of your PDFs, uploaded it to a test site, and added a link, and it opened fine for me. But I see what you’re seeing on your site. Since my site and yours are behaving differently, I suspect it’s something to do with yours, but I’m not sure what.

To test, can you please just create a new page using the WordPress block editor. Add a custom html block, and paste the following into it. Then replace URL-OF-THE-PDF-HERE with the url to one of your PDFs. Don’t add anything else. Then see if it opens (it does for me).

<a href="URL-OF-THE-PDF-HERE">Open</a>

You did a lot of troubleshooting, so I’m not entirely sure what to suggest next.

Hi @ws24!

Looking at the error you reported, that’s not actually be generated by our plugin. It looks like the carousel plugin you are using also loads a version of fancybox, and it’s their version generating the error. The error is from the wp-carousel-free plugin:

...plugins/wp-carousel-free/public/js/fancybox.min.js....

You may want to reach out to them?

For now, since it doesn’t look like ours, I’m going to mark this resolved. But please feel free to follow up with questions.

Very long overdue, but just wanted to follow up and let you know that the slideshow speed setting for Firelight Pro lightbox has been released. You’ll find it below the slideshow button setting in the Lightbox > Toolbar settings.

Thanks for following up and glad you worked it out!

That was going to be the first thing I suggested checking.

I wanted to add that you did a great job creating those popup bios for contributors! Really nice use of the lightbox.

@junior – Sorry for delayed response. That’s definitely not normal on mobile. Something is misfiring, but it’s hard to understand what would cause that.

We’ll double check mobile devices here to ensure there’s no regression. But I’m assuming there’s something specific to the site, device or browser that we need to identify.

1. Can you see if you can duplicate the same issue if you browse images on this page with your phone: https://firelightwp.com/free-lightbox-v2/? That will tell us if it is site specific.

2. Are you willing to send a link with the page? That way we can test it and see if we see the something on our phones. That’ll tell us if it’s device-specific If you prefer to keep it private, you can send it via firelightwp.com/contact.
– Alternatively, you could test this on a family or friend’s phone, and see if you can duplicate.

Hi @chadbush! You can turn that off if you like. Go to Lightbox settings, to the Miscellaneous section, and uncheck the ‘Enable Block Controls’ setting.

We are considering adding lightbox settings to that section in the inspector sidebar that would allow you to customize lightbox settings on a per-image or per-gallery basis. It sounds like you would not be a fan, so we’ll count that as a vote against.

Thanks for being a long time user of the plugin. I hope you continue, but if not, we wish you the best.

Hi! I think I understand the issue. Can you tell me if you are adding a fancybox class like ‘fancybox-iframe’ to your link? Normally that would be needed to open a link to a third party website.

I added a page to our site that demos a few things here:

https://firelightwp.com/free-lightbox/open-lightbox-from-image-caption-link/

You’ll see two images. The first is added via the core image block. I added/updated a caption as you suggested and added two links. The first link is just to an image on my site and works. We autodetect image links. The second link is to Wikipedia, and if I just add the link, it links to the page, but not in the lightbox.

To get a link to a third party site to open in a lightbox, you need to apply ‘fancybox-iframe’ as a CSS class on the link. There’s now way to do that in the context of an image caption.

So to duplicate, I copied the markup from the frontend, went back to the editor, and copied in the markup using an html block. That allows me to customize the markup. I think updated the wikipedia link to have the fancbox-iframe class, and you’ll see that now opens in the lightbox.

Here’s the html I’m suing in the second image. Note the fancybox-frame classes on the links.

<div class="wp-block-image">
  <figure class="aligncenter size-large">
    <img decoding="async" src="https://firelightwp.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Landscapes-818-020-1024x684.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-1464">
    <figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Some dramatic clouds and light from the setting sun on Catherdral Rock in Sedona Arizona.<br>I’m now adding <a href="https://firelightwp.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Landscapes-818-007-scaled.jpg" class="fancybox image" aria-controls="fancybox-wrap" aria-haspopup="dialog">a link to a separate image</a> to this caption. It should open in a lightbox.
      <br>Here's a link to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress" class="fancybox-iframe">wikipedia</a> with the 'fancybox-iframe' class. 
      <br>Here's a link to <a href="https://google.com" class="fancybox-iframe">google</a> with the 'fancybox-iframe' class. 
    </figcaption>
  </figure>
</div>

—

First can you confirm you’re adding fancybox-iframe in some way if possible? If not, I’m not sure how our lightbox would detect that link and open it.

As a secondary note… the ability to open a third party website in a lightbox can run into cross origin permission/security issues. Many websites do not allow it. Wikipedia does. But google.com does not. To demo that, I added a link to Google with the exact same markup, and you’ll see that one fails.