Image captions appearing twice in lightbox viewer

[bronwyn-at-qm]

Hi folks, wondering if someone could advise on an issue I'm having with image captions in my Quire project. I'm new to Quire and not a technical expert, so I've just been teaching myself using the (very helpful!) documentation.

In the essay view when previewing my project, all the images in my project appear with a caption and a credit line beneath them, as per the figures.yaml file. But when I click on the image to show it at a larger size in the lightbox, the caption appears twice and the credit line not at all. It's happening with all images (see attached example). I've looked carefully through all the yaml files to see if I can identify anything in the code that would be causing this, but I'm drawing a blank. And I've not touched any of the files in other subfolders - only the content folder working within the default Quire template.

Any suggestions? I'm using version 1.0.0-rc.25. Many thanks!

[Erin-Cecele]

Hi @bronwyn-at-qm I would start by updating to the newest version of Quire to see if that clears the issue. You can follow these instructions: https://quire.getty.edu/docs-v1/install-uninstall/#update-an-existing-project. If that still doesn't work, please share your figures.yaml file with me. Sometimes, the little things that cause Quire to act buggy are like finding a needle in a haystack!

[bronwyn-at-qm]

Hi @Erin-Cecele, thanks for that. This seems to have fixed the issue, although even updating to the newest version of Quire was VERY confusing. I was getting all sorts of error messages relating to nodes and version compatibility. I've managed to resolve it with the assistance of Google Gemini to translate bits of code and suggest next steps. But for some reason the 'quire preview' command no longer works and, according to Gemini, I now need to use 'npm run dev' instead to view the project. Something to do with my local system's path environment not finding it within the node modules, so 'npm run' is its suggested workaround. Which does seem to work, but I must admit that I am feeling quite out of my depth understanding the intricacies of Quire when something requires troubleshooting. I'm surprised I've made it this far, to be honest. It's such a learning curve for editors with no prior coding experience. I'm close to being able to deploy the project, however, so I will press on!

[Erin-Cecele]

Hi @bronwyn-at-qm I completely understand. I come from a non-technical background as well. Quire does have a steep learning curve, and the work environment is not the most intuitive, especially the Terminal. One thing potentially worth clarifying is that the Terminal will show a lot of messaging. You can ignore most of it. You only need to worry about things that say "ERR" or "Error". When you receive error messages, I would be cautious using AI. In my experience, it tends to overcomplicate things and have you do unnecessary/confusing steps like running npm run dev. In the future, please feel free to send me screenshots via the forum. I am very happy to help translate them/let you know what you can ignore and what requires action. It's also helpful for me to know what kinds of errors you are encountering ,as it could be something that needs to be fixed in the core code and not just on your system. So please never hesitate to reach out!!

As a side note, we are going to be doing a big push in 2026 to improve Quire's usability. Stay tuned for more information about that in the coming months!

[bronwyn-at-qm]

Thanks @Erin-Cecele, I appreciate your help. Yes, even as I was plugging bits of code into Gemini I was a bit wary it was taking me down a rabbit hole I didn't want to go down! I think I will actually try again with updating the version of Quire on a new copy of the project and seeing where the stumbling blocks are. AI is always incredibly over-confident in its ability to solve problems, and I agree it tends to overcomplicate things. It's semi-useful in translating the meaning of a piece of code to plain English for novices like me (so I can know whether to ignore it or if it's telling me something important), but generally speaking I'm cautious about all AI applications.

I'm travelling for work for the next couple of days, but I'll find some time to come back to this project next week and I'll send through screenshots if I get stuck. Look forward to seeing where Quire goes in 2026 - despite the learning curve, I've been singing its praises to colleagues around the museum and we definitely have a few other projects we'd like to pursue once I finish the current one. Will be in touch!

[Erin-Cecele]

Thanks @bronwyn-at-qm. Safe travels. I look forward to hearing from you should you need assistance!