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Why gallery card links live ON the image (attachment meta), and post-driven galleries came free

· 2 min read
Jon-Michael Lastimosa
Jon-Michael Lastimosa
Senior Web Developer

The question: cards needed to link somewhere on click — a per-image URL, and ideally "each portfolio card links to its portfolio page." Where does a per-image URL live when the Images option is a multi-upload that stores only attachment IDs?

Context: multi-upload has no per-item fields, and the gallery's whole content model reads per-image data (alt, caption, title, description) from the Media Library. The click action had only Lightbox / Do Nothing.

Options considered:

  • An order-matched URL list (addable rows beside the images) — breaks silently the moment images are reordered or removed; two lists pretending to be one.
  • Abusing the attachment Description field as a URL — collides with Caption Source, which already offers Description as caption text.
  • Restructuring Images into an addable-box of {image, link} — per-item fields, but a breaking value-shape change to the images option and a worse multi-image picking UX.
  • A "Link URL" field on the attachment itself — attachment_fields_to_edit/_save puts a field in the media modal under Alt/Caption, stored as _upw_link_url meta.
  • For the portfolio case specifically: a Post Type source — cards built from a post type's featured images, link = permalink, no per-image config at all.

Decision: both ends. The link lives on the attachment (_upw_link_url via the media-modal field), read when On Card Click = Open Link, with external hosts auto-opening a new tab (the tag_list convention) and alt falling back caption → title so linked cards always have an accessible name. And the Content tab gained a Source picker (Media Library | Post Type — a NEW key, so old saves are untouched and images keeps its original path): the Post Type choice lists public types with featured-image support dynamically, so Portfolio appears when that extension is active with no hard dependency, and each card links to its post automatically.

Why: the URL belongs to the image, in the same place its caption and alt already live — it follows the image wherever it is reused, survives reordering, and is edited through the builder's normal "Edit image" flow (the media-replaceability rule). And the strongest use case for per-card links — "my portfolio, linked" — is better served by not entering URLs at all: the Post Type source derives cards and links from content that already exists, and stays fresh as posts are published.