FancyBox for WordPress

About this plugin

Questions

How do I add a caption?

Three ways, and they stack:

• Set the image’s Title in the media library or block settings — it appears under the image.
• Add a caption in the block editor — it is picked up automatically.

• Add data-caption to the link for longer or formatted text:

Basic HTML such as <br>, <em> and <a> is allowed. Captions are sanitised before display, so scripts and event handlers are stripped.

How do I stop one image opening in the lightbox?

Add class="nolightbox" to the link. Links from Envira Gallery and NextGen Gallery are skipped automatically so the two lightboxes do not fight.

The lightbox looks wrong — the image is cut off, stretched, or barely visible

Almost always another plugin or theme loading its own copy of FancyBox. Two stylesheets defining the same class names will fight, because FancyBox’s CSS class names are shared.

To check, open your browser’s developer tools, look at the Network tab, and search for fancybox. If you see a .css file from anywhere other than /plugins/fancybox-for-wordpress/, that is the conflict. Disabling the other lightbox, or the option in your theme that loads it, resolves it.

3.4.2 fixed the worst version of this, where the image collapsed to a thin sliver and videos played sound with no picture.

Images loaded by infinite scroll or lazy loading do not open

Fixed in 3.4.1. Thumbnails added after the page has finished loading — infinite scroll, lazy loading, AJAX filters — are now detected and bound automatically. Update if you are on an older version.

Can I load the lightbox only on certain pages?

Yes, with a filter. Put this in your theme’s functions.php or a site-specific plugin:

add_filter( 'mfbfw_is_enabled', function ( $enabled ) {
    return is_page( array( 'portfolio', 'gallery' ) );
} );

Returning false means nothing loads at all — no CSS, no JavaScript. There are also built-in switches for mobile, WooCommerce shop pages and product pages under Behaviour.

PDFs open in the lightbox. How do I stop that?

Turn on Exclude PDF files under Behaviour and PDF links will open normally.

Note that iOS Safari cannot display a PDF inside an overlay at all. If your visitors are mostly on iPhones or iPads, excluding PDFs is the more reliable choice.

How do I group images into galleries?

Under Galleries, choose how links are grouped:

• All images on the page — one gallery for everything (default)
• Each gallery block — one gallery per block editor gallery
• Each post — one gallery per post on archive pages
• No galleries — every image opens on its own
• Custom expression — write your own jQuery selector

Does it work with WooCommerce, Elementor or other page builders?

WooCommerce has its own product image zoom, so there are switches under Behaviour to turn the lightbox off on shop and product pages.

Page builders vary. The plugin looks for links pointing at an image file, so builders that output normal image links work. Builders that render their own lightbox usually need theirs disabled first.