Any image in a slider can become a video slide. You paste a YouTube, Vimeo or MP4/WebM link into the image’s Video URL field, and the image becomes the poster with a play button. Nothing is loaded from YouTube or Vimeo until a visitor clicks. This guide shows how to add a video and the two settings that control playback.
What You’ll Learn
- How to add a video link to an image
- Where video slides work
- Playing videos in the slide or in the lightbox
- Privacy and how autoplay behaves with videos
Adding a Video to an Image
- Open the image in the Media Library, or click it in the media window of the Gallery block.
- In the attachment details, find the Video URL field.
- Paste a YouTube or Vimeo link, or the address of an MP4 or WebM file.
- Save. The image is now the poster of the video.
Because the link is stored with the image, it follows the image into every gallery and slider it is used in. To turn a video slide back into a plain image, empty the field.
Where Video Slides Work
Video slides work in Gallery blocks, Classic Editor galleries, WooCommerce product galleries, and in content and saved sliders that show Media Library images. The slide shows a play badge, so visitors can tell it apart from photos.
Where Videos Play
Go to Gallery Slider > Content and choose Play:
- In the slide (the default) – a click starts the video where the image is.
- In the lightbox – a click opens the lightbox and starts the video there, in a larger view.
With the lightbox turned off on the Settings tab, videos always play in the slide.
Privacy, Autoplay and Moving On
- Use privacy-enhanced YouTube – on by default. Videos load from youtube-nocookie.com, so YouTube sets no cookies until a visitor plays a video.
- Before the click, only your poster image is loaded – no player, no script from YouTube or Vimeo – so video slides do not slow the page down.
- Autoplay pauses while a video plays, and a video stops when the visitor moves to another slide.
Video slides are available in Gallery Slider Suite Pro.