Captions, backgrounds and hover

The controls that turn a working gallery into one that looks like it belongs on your site.

How a caption is built

Tick fields in the free plugin and they are joined into one caption. Pro splits that into two styled lines and lets you put words around them.

First line	The first ticked field, usually the title. Its own font, size, weight, colour and italic.
Second line	Everything else, joined by the between fields separator, with its own typography.
Before and after	Fixed text either side of each line. Taken in before the year, © 2026 after the title.
Arrangement	Stacked puts the title on its own line; Inline runs everything together on one.

Both separators preserve spaces exactly as typed, so / and / give different results and both are respected.

Caption position

On hover keeps the grid clean and reveals the text over the photo. Above and Below keep it always visible, which is what you want when the caption carries information rather than decoration — a price, a date, a catalogue number. In list view the caption is always beside the photo; only None changes anything there.

Backgrounds

Two colours in the display builder:

• Gallery background — behind the whole gallery, including the gaps.
• Behind each photo — the card colour, visible around photos that do not fill their tile and behind captions placed above or below.

Both take a colour picker or a hex value, and both accept none for transparent. A dark gallery background with a slightly lighter card colour is usually more convincing than one flat colour.

Hover effects

Default	The built-in gentle zoom, as it has always been. Choosing this changes nothing about existing displays.
Zoom in	The photo grows slightly under the pointer. Strength sets how far.
Zoom out	The photo eases back instead of forward, which suits dense archive grids.
Tint	A wash of colour over the photo, in a colour you pick. Captions stay readable on top of it.
Black & white	Full colour at rest, draining to grey under the pointer. Strength sets how grey.
Colour on hover	Grey at rest, returning to full colour under the pointer. Strength sets how grey it rests at.
Lift	The card rises with a shadow. Reads as clickable in list view, where a zoom looks odd.
Nothing	Explicitly still, including the built-in zoom.

Strength runs Subtle, Light, Medium, Strong, Heavy, and only ever changes how much of an effect is applied, never which way it runs. A direction is its own effect: Zoom in and Zoom out, Black & white and Colour on hover.

Speed runs from instant to 800ms. Everything is pure CSS, so nothing extra loads on the front end. Effects respect a visitor’s reduced-motion setting, and on touch screens they apply while pressed rather than sticking after a tap.

Reusing a look

Once a display looks right, open another and use Copy settings from to take its layout, captions, backgrounds and hover across without touching which items it shows. See Building a display.