Troubleshooting Easy FancyBox

If, after activation, your images do not open in a FancyBox overlay, there are several possible reasons. Some are easily solved, others are more difficult. You can find a list of known issues below.

Follow these basic checks to make sure everything is in place:

Basic checks

1. Make sure that thumbnail images are linked directly to their larger counterpart, not to a dynamic WordPress page that includes the larger image. This means when you insert an image in your posts or pages, you need to select Media File at the Link option instead of Page URL. You’ll have to manually edit your old posts if you have always inserted images with Page URL before, FancyBox cannot do this for you.
2. Make sure you have all the needed media and their Auto-detect options activated on your Settings > Media admin page. If you are using images in other formats that JPG, GIF or PNG, you need to add the extensions to the Auto-detect field for Images. Please note: The image file names must actaully end with that extension! This means that if you have an image file that (for example) has no extension (does not end with .jpg or any other) even if is in JPEG compressed format, the FancyBox will not be able to detect is as an image. You will need to manually give those links the class fancybox image to trigger FancyBox.

General trouble shooting steps

1. Switch off all other plugins and switch your sites appearance to the default Twenty Seventeen theme. FancyBox should work now. If so, continue with the next step. If not, re-install the plugin and verify the basic steps above.
2. Switch back to your original theme and check if FancyBox is still working. If so, continue with the next step. If not, See the Theme Incompatibility checks below.
3. One by one, switch each plugin that you had running before back ON. Keep checking to see at which point FancyBox starts failing and you will hve found the conflicting plugin.

Theme Incompatibility checks

1. See known theme conflicts above first, then continue with these following steps.
2. Make sure your theme is capable of placing the needed javascript and css in the page header and footer. Open any page on your site and view the source code by right-clicking on an empty section and selecting ‘View source…’ (or similar). There you will need to check of there are any references to javascript files like jquery.fancybox.min.js?ver=x.x.x near the closing </body> tag. There should also be a easy-fancybox.min.css?ver=x.x.x in the head section… If it’s not there, your theme is really out of date. Consider switching to a new theme fast!
3. Make sure that your theme does not load the main jQuery library file more than once. Look for references to javascript files like jquery.js?ver=x.x.x or jquery.min.js in the page source code. If you find more than one, try to find out in which theme template file that second reference is hard-coded and remove that line. Usually in header.php or footer.php
4. Check if your theme loads another or the same lightbox script. Look for references to Thickbox, Prettyphoto, Lightbox2, Colorbox or FancyBox script files or code. These are very likely to cause the incompatibility and you will either have to remove these by hacking your theme or switch to another theme.

If you still do not see your images in FancyBox, ask on the Easy FancyBox WordPress forum.

Plugin Incompatibility checks

1. If you followed the general trouble shooting steps above, you should now be aware of which plugin is conflicting whith Easy FancyBox. See known plugin conflicts above first. If the plugin and its solution are not mentioned there, continue with the following steps.
2. Make sure that the plugins do not make the main jQuery library file load more than once. Look for references to javascript files like jquery.js?ver=x.x.x or jquery.min.js in the page source code. If you find more than one, try to find out where that comes from.
3. Check if your theme loads another or the same lightbox script or any other of the needed jQuery extensions like jquery.easing or jquery.mousewheel. Look for references to Thickbox, Prettyphoto, Lightbox2, Colorbox or FancyBox script files or code. These are very likely to cause the incompatibility and you will have to either find a setting in the other plugin to switch OFF the use of the conflicting script (possible in NextGEN for example, see under Advanced below) or choose between the two conflicting plugins.

KNOWN ISSUES

General

• Outbound click or Download tracking in some of the stats plugins can interfere with FancyBox. Disable such options or exclude links manually with a class if possible (see instructions for SlimStat below)
• Most plugins and themes that already include a light box script. Continue reading to see if you are using one of the know ones or follow the troubleshooting steps to find out what is conflicting on your site.
• Any theme that is missing the obligatory <?php wp_footer(); ?> call in the footer.php template.
• When showing an iframe as inline content in FancyBox — not advised, use fancybox-iframe instead! — the iframe will become blank after opening and closing it. The solution is to link directly to the iframe source and use class="fancybox-iframe" instead.
• Embedded flash content that has no wmode or wmode ‘window’, is displayed above the overlay and other javascript rendered content like dropdown menus. WordPress does NOT check for missing wmode in oEmbed generated embed code. Since version 1.3.4.5, the missing wmode is added by this plugin for WP (auto-)embeds but not for other user-embedded content. Please make sure you set the wmode parameter to ‘opaque’ (best performance) or ‘transparent’ (only when you need transparency) for your embedded content.

Plugin conflicts

• jQuery Updater moves jQuery to version 2+ which is incompatible.
• WP Slimstat and Matomo/Piwik with Track Outbound Clicks enabled, will break the light box effect on some browsers. Adding fancybox (or any of the other classes like fancybox-youtube,fancybox-iframe,fancybox-inline depending on which media should be displayed in FancyBox) to the Do Not Track field is reported to solve the issue. Slimstat also might interfere with the YouTube url conversion. When clicking a Youtube link, the movie opens in an overlay as it is supposed to but immediately after that, the complete page gets redirected to the original YouTube page. Adding a class="noslimstat" to the link is reported to work around the issue.
• Google Analytics for WordPress converts links like href="#anyID" to href="http://yoursite.url/page/#anyID", disabling inline content shown in FancyBox.
• Both the uBillBoard and Camera slideshow have their own easing script hard-coded which conflicts with the one in Easy FancyBox. The only way around the conflict is to set both the Easing In and Easing Out options on your Settings > Media page to Swing.
• WordPress Firewall 2 blocks access to image files needed for proper display of the FancyBox overlay in older IE and other non-css3 browsers.
• WordPress Amazon Associate: A script provided by Amazon and the FancyBox script are incompatible. Disabling Product Preview in the WP – Amazon > Settings page should work around the issue.
• WP Supersized uses the Animate Enhanced jQuery extension which causes a conflict with the Easing extension used by FancyBox resulting in a 0px sized lightbox frame and/or some kind of positioning issue with auto-centering.

Theme conflicts

• Older versions of Elegant Themes have FancyBox integrated in a hard-coded way, making them incompatible with Easy FancyBox. In the latest versions of these themes, there is an option to disable the included FancyBox. Use this option to make your theme compatible with Easy FancyBox 🙂
• The Mystique theme has two options called “Lightbox” and “Optimize website for faster loading” that will break Easy FancyBox. Disable both in Mystique’s options > Advanced.
• Imbalance and other themes that uses the Photo Galleria jQuery extension: turn of the JSGallery option.
• Themes like Envisioned, Chameleon and many others have FancyBox baked in. There is no solution other than stripping the theme of all FancyBox related code or better: disable the plugin and use the theme provided version…
• Themes based on the Thesis framework might see issues in IE 8, for which a hack has been proposed.