I'm working with a lightbox plugin to show images when thumbnails are clicked on. The plugin works by wrapping the thumbnail in an anchor tag that has the href as the direct path to the full-size image. This acts as a non-js fallback, so that if JS isn't present for whatever reason, the user still sees the image. When JS is enabled, the image is shown in the lighbox, resized to fit in the lightbox, which is a variable size depending on the browser.
I need to keep a record of the number of times that the image has been clicked on, as thumbnails will be ordered by the number of views. The problem of course is that I'm directly linking to the image, so I can't put a script on this page.
I've tried two things instead, neither of which worked:
1) Instead setting the target as the path to the image, I set it to a PHP script, then outputted the image in an <img/> tag. The problem was that the image is then not resized according to the size of the lighbox. So this is no good.
2) I set the target of the lightbox as a PHP script which recorded the viewing of the image, and redirected to the image page. This didn't work either, as the lightbox showed the data for the image (text) instead of the image itself.
So, I've hit a bit of a barrier. I'm wondering if I can set something up in my PHP settings that will automatically call a script when hitting images, or maybe something in an .htaccess file that will do the same, but I'm not aware of if this can be done, nor how to do it, and I haven't found anything yet with my googling. Does anyone have any thoughts?
Thanks.