Auto Image Link Maker scans your pages for images and groups them into lightboxes. It’s configurable via CSS selectors and includes developer-friendly hooks for per-page overrides.
Images inside HTML tables and other block editor content often aren’t wrapped in links — they’re just static. This plugin fixes that by wrapping plain images with anchor tags and opening them in a touch-friendly lightbox. Images in the same container (e.g a table or gallery block) are isolated into their own lightbox galleries.
Client-side solution
The plugin runs a small JavaScript script on the front end that wraps unwrapped images in anchor links. The script checks each image to see if it already has a parent <a> tag using element.closest('a') — a clean, native DOM method. If there’s no anchor, it wraps the image and links to the full-size source.
I considered using the WordPress WP HTML Tag Processor tool, but the client-side DOM method turned out to be much more robust, as we’re always working with a validated DOM.
Built-In lightbox
Wrapped images open in a smooth, touch-friendly lightbox powered by GLightbox. No jQuery dependency, no external CDN — everything is bundled. Images in the same container (like a table or gallery block) form a swipeable lightbox gallery, so visitors can navigate through multiple images without closing the overlay.
Configurable & developer-friendly
You control which images are affected using CSS selectors (default: #main img), and which page types the plugin runs on (posts, pages, archives, etc.). There’s also an exclude list for things like site logos and avatars.
For developers, the plugin provides apply_filters() hooks so you can override behaviour on a per-page basis. Want to disable the lightbox on specific pages, or add custom selectors for WooCommerce product galleries? There’s a filter for that.
The plugin is built with PHP 8.0+ and WordPress 6.0+ in mind. It follows WordPress coding standards, ships with machine-translated language files for eight locales, and includes an uninstall routine that cleans up after itself.