Thank you for the info, Bogdan. That is very concerning in that it means that because the vast majority of the images we are using on this site are externally housed, we cannot use any type of slider or gallery plugin that uses shortcodes, or the visitor will see constant “the image could not be loaded” errors. I have used dozens of themes over the past 4-5 years and I have never encountered this before. Do you have any thoughts of providing a global option to disable the lightbox effect entirely? We really like so many things about this theme, but we are going to have to abandon it now if we can’t use gallery or slider plugins. I guess I am confused as to why you would create a theme that negates the use of any other galleries or sliders that are using external links, rather than just remove your own lightboxing feature and bundle a few plug-ins with it, or at least recommend a few third-party options if galleries or sliders are required by the site developer.

Want to add to this, the issue is specifically when I have a shortcode on a post to embed a gallery as opposed to individual images. Example: [SME_gallery ids=’4tT7vgP,7NK6ptN’ size=’MediumURL’ columns=’2′ caption='{SMUGMUGCAPTION}’ link=’Lightbox’ new=’Yes’]. This is embedding SmugMug images, and the images appear correctly, but when clicked on it forces your lightbox to load. That’s why I am hoping there is some way to completely disable ii, since individual images when placed and clicked on take the visitor to the appropriate SmugMug image or gallery. Thanks!