How to set start slide number?

First of all thanks very much to the contributors for this brilliant suite of modules. I'm using 7.x-3.0.

I am using 2 VSS views - one controlling the other - with the same data filters used in both. One is a summary view gallery and the other is a colorbox node display with a detailed view gallery (of the same image data). The summary view is a high-level gallery page with thumbnails (using VSS and jcarousel) and one medium-sized main picture - showing the current carousel image.

The detailed view is a second VSS view in a popup colorbox node which contains a slideshow with a bigger image and pager controls. This is all working fine.

What I am struggling with is how to get the second slideshow to start at the correct slide - i.e. the slide that was clicked on in the summary view.

I cannot use a URL-based solution because with colorbox the URL remains the same with the popup overlay (i.e. the parent page) - it is not updated based on a thumb or image selection.

I have looked extensively into this and among other things I tried setting the Advanced Options startingSlide option in the views Format Slideshow settings. However, I don't know how to specify a variable value for this. Is this possible? This method seems to go to the first slide then jumps to the specified slide. Is there a way to just go straight to the specified slide?

In the apparent absence of views arguments integration (see #1106038: Views arguments as default selected), and I couldn't get #1106038: Views arguments as default selected to work - I tried the following jQuery code :-

  Drupal.behaviors.viewsSlideshowCycle_MyOverride = {
    attach: function (context) {
      $('.views_slideshow_cycle_main:first', context).each(function() {
        var fullId = '#' + $(this).attr('id');
        var settings = Drupal.settings.viewsSlideshowCycle[fullId];
        settings.opts.startingSlide = 2;
      });
    }
  };

This works with a hard-code starting slide value (i.e. 2), but I have a bit of work to do to determine the selected slide ID. However, I just can't help feeling there is an easier solution? Besides, the above solution doesn't look great because the popup slideshow starts on the first slide and then jumps to the desired slide. Ideally it would just jump straight to the specified slide. (I'm sorry this site is still under development and is not publicly accessible yet.)

Does this functionality already exist somewhere or can anyone suggest a solution?