Social sharing lets visitors share a Gallery, an Album, or an individual item to Facebook, X, Pinterest, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Telegram, Reddit, or email, and to copy a direct link to the clipboard. FotoGrids draws the share controls in three places — the Lightbox, hover bars on thumbnails, and the header or footer of standalone Gallery and Album view pages — and counts every click against your statistics so you can see which items are doing the work.
Location FotoGrids → Settings → Sharing
How Sharing Works #
Sharing in FotoGrids is global by default. One configuration drives every Gallery and Album on the site, and any individual Gallery or Album can opt to override that configuration for itself. The site-wide settings live under FotoGrids → Settings → Sharing, and the per-collection override lives on the Gallery or Album editor under Social & Sharing.
When a visitor clicks a share button, FotoGrids opens the network’s standard share window — Facebook’s share dialog, X’s compose box, Pinterest’s pin creator, and so on — pre-filled with the item or collection’s URL and a piece of share text. Copy Link writes the URL to the clipboard and shows a brief tooltip confirmation. Email opens the visitor’s default mail client with a pre-filled subject and body.
Sharing is off by default on a fresh install. Turn it on under FotoGrids → Settings → Sharing before any share controls appear on the site.
Share buttons never appear on Album thumbnails. An Album thumbnail is a cover image that navigates into the Gallery it represents, not into a Lightbox, so the thumbnail and Lightbox placements are skipped for Albums. Sharing on Albums uses the View Page placement instead.
Site-Wide Settings #
Enable Sharing
| Setting | Enable sharing |
| Options | On Off |
| Default | Off |
The master switch. When off, no share controls render anywhere on the site, regardless of per-collection overrides, and the rest of the sharing settings are hidden. When on, the remaining settings appear and share controls render on every Gallery and Album that has not opted out.
Networks
| Setting | Networks |
| Options (multi-select) | Facebook X (Twitter) Pinterest LinkedIn WhatsApp Telegram Reddit Email Copy Link |
| Default | Facebook X (Twitter) Pinterest Email Copy Link |
| Visible when | Enable sharing is on |
The set of share buttons FotoGrids shows. Toggle each network on or off individually. The order shown in the settings panel is the order the buttons render in on the frontend.
A few notes on individual networks:
- Pinterest — opens Pinterest’s pin creator with the item’s image URL pre-attached. Pinterest needs an image to create a pin, so this button is most useful on item-level shares.
- WhatsApp and Telegram — open the network’s web share URL, which on mobile devices hands off to the installed app.
- Email — opens the visitor’s default mail client via a
mailto:link, with the share text in the subject and body. - Copy Link — writes the URL to the clipboard and shows a confirmation tooltip. Useful for visitors who want to share somewhere FotoGrids does not have a button for.
Placement
| Setting | Placement |
| Options (multi-select) | View Page Lightbox Thumbnails |
| Default | View Page Lightbox |
| Visible when | Enable sharing is on |
Where share controls appear on the frontend. Each placement is independent — you can turn any combination on or off.
- View Page — share controls in the header or footer of the standalone view page rendered when a visitor opens a Gallery or Album at its own URL.
- Lightbox — a share button in the Lightbox toolbar that opens a small share menu over the current item.
- Thumbnails — a share bar that appears on each grid thumbnail when the visitor hovers over it. Skipped automatically on Albums.
Button Style
| Setting | Button style |
| Options | Icons only Icons + labels Labels only |
| Default | Icons only |
| Visible when | Enable sharing is on |
How each share button is drawn. Icons only is the most compact and the recommended choice for hover bars on thumbnails, where space is tight. Icons + labels pairs each icon with the network name, which is clearer for visitors who do not recognise every logo. Labels only drops the icons entirely and is useful for text-led footer share rows.
Button Size
| Setting | Button size |
| Options | Small Medium Large |
| Default | Medium |
| Visible when | Enable sharing is on |
The pixel size of the share buttons. Small fits comfortably on dense thumbnail grids. Medium is the everyday default. Large suits standalone view pages where the share row is part of the page’s main content.
Custom Share Text
| Setting | Custom share text |
| Options | Free text with {title} and {url} placeholders |
| Default | Empty (network’s own default text) |
| Visible when | Enable sharing is on |
The text FotoGrids passes to networks that accept pre-filled copy — X, Telegram, WhatsApp, Reddit, and Email. Use {title} to insert the Gallery, Album, or item title, and {url} to insert the shared URL. A typical pattern is Check out {title} — {url}.
Leave the field empty to let each network use its own default — for most networks that means just the URL, which the network then expands into a preview card from the page’s Open Graph tags. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest do not accept pre-filled text and always rely on Open Graph data.
Track Share Clicks
| Setting | Track share clicks |
| Options | On Off |
| Default | On |
| Visible when | Enable sharing is on |
When on, FotoGrids records a share event every time a visitor clicks a share button. The event increments the share counter on the underlying object — Gallery, Album, or item — and fires the fotogrids/actions/share/tracked hook with the network name, which developers can listen for to push events into third-party analytics.
Counters surface inside the Statistics dashboard, on the Gallery and Album editors, and on the per-item view in the Lightbox info panel. Turning tracking off stops new events being recorded but does not erase existing counts.
Click tracking is intent-based, not delivery-based. FotoGrids records the click on your site when the visitor opens the share window — it cannot tell whether they completed the post on Facebook, X, or any other external network.
Per-Collection Overrides #
Site-wide settings are the baseline. Each Gallery and Album can override the baseline for itself under its Social & Sharing tab — useful when one collection needs a different set of networks, a tighter placement, or no sharing at all.
The override panel only appears when site-wide sharing is on. If sharing is turned off site-wide, the per-collection tab shows a notice with a link to the global settings and no other controls render.
Override Sharing for This Collection
| Setting | Override sharing for this collection |
| Options | On Off |
| Default | Off |
| Visible when | Site-wide Enable sharing is on |
The collection-level master switch. While off, this Gallery or Album inherits every site-wide sharing setting. Turn it on to unlock the override controls below and customise sharing for this collection only.
Disable Sharing for This Collection
| Setting | Disable sharing for this collection |
| Options | On Off |
| Default | Off |
| Visible when | Override sharing for this collection is on |
A quick way to hide every share control on a single Gallery or Album even though sharing is enabled site-wide. Useful for private client galleries, internal collections, or galleries containing material you do not want amplified. When on, no share buttons render on this collection in any placement, and the other override controls are disabled.
Networks (Override)
| Setting | Networks |
| Options (multi-select) | Facebook X (Twitter) Pinterest LinkedIn WhatsApp Telegram Reddit Email Copy Link |
| Default | Inherits from site-wide Networks |
| Visible when | Override sharing for this collection is on and Disable sharing for this collection is off |
The set of share buttons to show for this collection. Replaces the site-wide selection entirely — there is no “add only” or “remove only” mode.
Display At (Override)
| Setting | Display at |
| Options (multi-select) | View Page Lightbox Thumbnails |
| Default | Inherits from site-wide Placement |
| Visible when | Override sharing for this collection is on and Disable sharing for this collection is off |
The placements to use for this collection. Replaces the site-wide selection entirely.
Custom Share Text (Override)
| Setting | Custom share text |
| Options | Free text with {title} and {url} placeholders |
| Default | Inherits from site-wide Custom share text |
| Visible when | Override sharing for this collection is on and Disable sharing for this collection is off |
Custom share text just for this collection. Leave empty to keep inheriting from the site-wide value.
Where Share Counts Appear #
Every recorded share increments three counters at once:
- The collection counter — the Gallery or Album that contains the shared item, or the Gallery or Album itself when shared as a whole.
- The item counter — the individual photo or video, when the share was an item-level share.
- The aggregated site-wide counter on the Statistics page.
Counts surface in three places. On the Statistics dashboard, sorted by total shares so you can see which collections are pulling weight. On the Gallery and Album editors, as a small share count next to each item in the editor. Inside the Lightbox info panel, alongside the view count for the item currently on screen.
The fotogrids/actions/share/tracked action fires once per recorded share and receives the object type (gallery, album, or item), the object ID, and the network slug. Developers can hook it to forward events to Google Analytics, Plausible, Fathom, or any other system.
Sharing Links to Specific Items #
When a visitor opens the Lightbox on a specific item and clicks Copy Link (or any other share button), the URL FotoGrids shares is not just the page URL — it is a deep link that reopens the Gallery on that exact item. Anyone who follows the shared link lands on the same image in the same Lightbox, ready to keep browsing.
Deep linking has its own settings and its own behaviour on standalone view pages versus embedded Galleries. The Deep Linking article covers how the URLs are built, what ?fg-item= and #fg- mean, and the Embedded galleries share setting that controls what an item share links to when the Gallery is embedded inside a page.
Privacy Notes #
FotoGrids does not load any third-party scripts to render share buttons. Every button is a plain link that points at the network’s standard share endpoint — no Facebook SDK, no Twitter widget, no Pinterest pin-it script. Visitors only contact the social network the moment they click a button.
Click tracking writes to your own database — the fotogrids_statistics table on your WordPress site. No data is sent to FotoGrids or to any external service.
