X3Photo Gallery Forums

Simon · 23 Oct 2025, 03:58

Hello dear X3 Photo Community,

I have linked my galleries in the top menu of my website, for example this one: https://simongude.com/Street-Photography/Unobtrusive-Moments/

I have configured X3 so that when I click on an image in the gallery, a pop-up appears and the EXIF information I need is displayed.

If I right click on the image to open the link in a new window, I get a new page – for example: https://simongude.com/Street-Photography/Unobtrusive-Moments/IMG_5539/

Now I'm wondering where I can change or hide the information displayed on this page. I am aware that the title, date and subtitle on this page come from the image's EXIF information.

Thank you in advance for your help :-)

28 Oct 2025, 05:37

Simon wrote:If I right click on the image to open the link in a new window, I get a new page – for example: https://simongude.com/Street-Photography/Unobtrusive-Moments/IMG_5539/

Yes, this is what is called your "image landing page", which is a unique full page made for each the image. It's rare that humans will see this, unless they "open link in new tab".

Simon wrote:Now I'm wondering where I can change or hide the information displayed on this page. I am aware that the title, date and subtitle on this page come from the image's EXIF information.

What info do you want to hide? To hide the EXIF info below the image, you could use Settings > Custom > Custom CSS:

.file-exif {
  display: none;
}

I don't see much point in modifying this page unless you are disabling the popup for some galleries. It's mostly for SEO and sharing, so that each image has it's own unique url, but it's less useful for humans than the popup.

Simon · 28 Oct 2025, 13:49

Great, thank you very much for this valuable tip. I actually only noticed the pages when I optimized my website for SEO and saw which metadata they were indexed with on Google and Bing.

I removed the subheader and the date using .subheader and .date according to your template. However, this does not work for the image landing page with .title, as it affects all pages.

I also noticed that the alt= value in the <img>-tag and the <data-title>-tag are fed from the EXIF data. Is there another way to define these two values?

Cheers
Simon

28 Oct 2025, 22:59

Simon wrote:Great, thank you very much for this valuable tip. I actually only noticed the pages when I optimized my website for SEO and saw which metadata they were indexed with on Google and Bing.

Yes, and this is one of the reasons these "image landing pages" exist, because search engines can index them as separate pages. The popup functionality (that is generally superior for humans) is just Javascript and not a "page" that can be indexed.

Simon wrote:I removed the subheader and the date using .subheader and .date according to your template. However, this does not work for the image landing page with .title, as it affects all pages.

Keep in mind, when hiding data and subheader like that, you are also hiding them from other pages, although it's likely you aren't displaying those elements on other pages anyway (X3 "pages" actually have context/settings to choose what elements should appear). To make sure you only hide these elements for these types of pages, you can use

.x3-file .title {
 display: none;
}
.x3-file .subheader {
 display: none;
}
.x3-file .date {
 display: none;
}

I'm actually not sure why you would want (or need) to hide the TITLE on these pages, but there is nothing wrong in hiding it.

Simon wrote:I also noticed that the alt= value in the <img>-tag and the <data-title>-tag are fed from the EXIF data. Is there another way to define these two values?

Actually, data-title isn't fed from EXIF, but the popup EXIF display info is fed from the images EXIF, and I'm not sure how that can be wrong. The alt tag simply comes from the images title, which you already can define for the image (defaults to file name), but no humans will see the alt-tag anyway. These pages are automatically generated, specifically to feed info to social media and search engines, and aren't often seen by humans. What do you want to change the alt-text to? It already displayed the title you have set and the exif data that is explicitly stored in the image. I really can't see why you want or need to change any info. You can hide elements by CSS.

Simon · 29 Oct 2025, 12:38

mjau-mjau wrote: Keep in mind, when hiding data and subheader like that, you are also hiding them from other pages, although it's likely you aren't displaying those elements on other pages anyway (X3 "pages" actually have context/settings to choose what elements should appear). To make sure you only hide these elements for these types of pages, you can use
Code
.x3-file .title {
 display: none;
}
.x3-file .subheader {
 display: none;
}
.x3-file .date {
 display: none;
}

Thank you very much, that works great :-)

Do you have any tips on how I can remove the x3-hover-scale icon? It's probably hidden in the x3-hover-icon-primary class, but removing it in the same way as in the example doesn't work yet.

mjau-mjau wrote: I'm actually not sure why you would want (or need) to hide the TITLE on these pages, but there is nothing wrong in hiding it.

Google and Bing like to index pages primarily using the <h1> tag. This means that my pages are indexed with different metadata. Since the <h1> tag comes from the EXIF data, removing it is the first step. The second and more time-consuming step is to re-upload all images with corrected EXIF data.

This is probably more of an aesthetic problem, but it still bothers me ;)

In the end, it's all about SEO and page indexing, and that happens in full text, not the way we humans view pages. Hence my questions and follow-up questions.

By the way, the create_image_sitemap.php page is no longer up to date. Google has long since stopped allowing manual uploads of sitemap.xml, which is why the ‘Submit to Google’ link produces a 404 error. Nevertheless, sitemap.xml is still very important!

Thank you again for your help, it is very valuable to me!

01 Nov 2025, 22:40

Simon wrote:Google and Bing like to index pages primarily using the <h1> tag. This means that my pages are indexed with different metadata. Since the <h1> tag comes from the EXIF data, removing it is the first step. The second and more time-consuming step is to re-upload all images with corrected EXIF data.

Yes, but if they won't index by <h1> tag, which is the text that seems most related to the image, what other text should the pages be indexed by? Pages are supposed to be indexed with "different" metadata, else they might not even get indexed or what's the point? How do you want the pages indexed and displaying on Google if they don't have any unique text info related to the image? That's how Google works.

I'm struggling to understand what you want to achieve here. If you don't want these pages indexed, then just go to Settings > Advanced > "Prevent search engines from indexing image pages".

Simon wrote:In the end, it's all about SEO and page indexing, and that happens in full text, not the way we humans view pages. Hence my questions and follow-up questions.

I'm really not sure what you mean by this "full text". How do you expect things will change by hiding or removing H1 titles? And when they change, what do you expect to display in search engines instead? No, SERP listings will not show the website the same as when viewing the actual website of course. It will use the page title and description ... If you try to remove any valid related info, it will revert to using descriptions that are unrelated, for example text from your footer/links. I certainly can't see how this will get better in any way by hiding text on the page.

Simon wrote:Do you have any tips on how I can remove the x3-hover-scale icon? It's probably hidden in the x3-hover-icon-primary class, but removing it in the same way as in the example doesn't work yet.

You mean, hide this icon, only on the image landing page, which is unlikely humans will see?

.x3-file .image-container:before {
  display: none;
}

Simon wrote:By the way, the create_image_sitemap.php page is no longer up to date. Google has long since stopped allowing manual uploads of sitemap.xml, which is why the ‘Submit to Google’ link produces a 404 error. Nevertheless, sitemap.xml is still very important!

create_image_sitemap.php does not "upload" the sitemap, it just creates it. Other apps might use it, and no, Google has not stopped using sitemaps ... However, Google doesn't need it, and will likely find all your links without sitemap. I personally would never use it, and I would recommend everyone to ignore it (because Google doesn't need it), but many customers want it nevertheless. Even though it's kinda pointless for search engines, some just "want it" and some use it for other applications.

Why is it "no longer up to date" yet "still very important!"? You speak in riddles.

Simon · 06 Nov 2025, 11:03

I think I'll elaborate a little more: a few weeks ago, I changed the title of my website, including in the EXIF data of my images.

What puzzled me was the fact that Google indexed pages with both the new and old titles.

What I later found out is that there is hard-coded data based on the EXIF data of the images in the gallery in the page.json file. This information is written to page.json when settings are saved in the backend. Unfortunately, saving does not update existing information based on the latest EXIF data of the images. This leads to inconsistencies in the metadata.

At the same time, I came across the “image landing page,” which, however, uses current EXIF data to display titles, etc. As a result, Google had indexed pages with both the old and new titles, which totally confused me and led me to the questions described here.

A quick note about sitemap.xml and create_image_sitemap.php. This page contains a link labelled ‘Submit to Google’ (https://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=htt ... itemap.xml), which no longer works because Google has discontinued this ‘ping function’. This was just a note to indicate that this function is obsolete.

Anyway, I now know a little more about how X3 works and operates, and that helps me a lot. Thank you for your help and clarification, it was a great help to me.

06 Nov 2025, 23:35

Simon wrote: a few weeks ago, I changed the title of my website, including in the EXIF data of my images.

What puzzled me was the fact that Google indexed pages with both the new and old titles.

You mean when you make a specific search for an old EXIF value, it showed the page for the image that used to contain that EXIF, although the exif for that image had changed? Well, there are a few reasons this could happen. First of all, Google can take MONTHS before it updates it's search indexes after you make changes. Furthermore, it might not DELETE the index for the old search for the same page, just because it changed.

About 7-8 years ago, our product was called "ImagevueX" ... Although that name has been entirely removed from everywhere since a very long time ago, search "imagevuex" on Google will still show our website "www.photo.gallery" as #1.

Simon wrote:What I later found out is that there is hard-coded data based on the EXIF data of the images in the gallery in the page.json file.

X3 might store titles and descriptions, inherited and possibly overwritten, from an image's IPTC tags (title, description etc), but never from EXIF.

Simon wrote:This information is written to page.json when settings are saved in the backend. Unfortunately, saving does not update existing information based on the latest EXIF data of the images. This leads to inconsistencies in the metadata.

IPTC may get cached in page.json yes, which is initially brought in from the original image. This is because we can't store titles and descriptions back into the image IPTC when users update their titles and descriptions from the X3 control panel. This works in a similar was as normal browser cache ... If you update an image, for example sharpening the image, you will NOT see those changes when you load the image in browser, because it's cached. So what's the solution? Rename the image, imagename2.jpg etc. That would then also solve IPTC related issues, and Google will always update their indexes to remove old "landing pages" for images that don't exist. Unfortunately, if you overwrite IPTC data on an image locally, and then re-upload overwriting existing image names, previous IPTC might still be stored, because it's imported from the first image.

Simon wrote:At the same time, I came across the “image landing page,” which, however, uses current EXIF data to display titles, etc. As a result, Google had indexed pages with both the old and new titles, which totally confused me and led me to the questions described here.

It's a bit unclear what "pages" you are on about here getting indexed by Google. Do you mean "image landing pages"? Do you have an example of an image landing page that is indexed "with both old and new titles"? Even if it is (I would like to check), do you mean you can see both old and new titles in the actual Google SERP (Google description)? Even if this is the case (I would like to understand exactly what you mean), I'm struggling to see how this is a problem.

In my opinion, Image landing pages should be disabled, because there are usually too many (spammy), and Google probably doesn't put much emphasis into them. I would guess that someone would need to use a search phrase that includes the actual domain name to even be able to get search results that show any image landing pages. It was initially created from the desire from some users to be able to "index" each an every image on Google, although this is unlikely to any useful degree.

Simon wrote:A quick note about sitemap.xml and create_image_sitemap.php. This page contains a link labelled ‘Submit to Google’ (https://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=htt ... itemap.xml), which no longer works because Google has discontinued this ‘ping function’. This was just a note to indicate that this function is obsolete.

Right! I will remove it on next update ...

The sitemap is still supported by Google, and can still be submitted from Google console. Google generally isn't very interested in sitemaps though, unless you have hidden pages that Google can't find naturally by crawling your website, which is highly unlikely.

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