Photonic Version 1.53 – Lightboxes for All, and Authkey

Posted on January 18, 2016
Categories Plugin Releases

I just released version 1.53 of Photonic. This is a pretty small release with a couple of big new additions:

  1. You now have the option to use Photonic’s lightbox for non-Photonic images. Bye bye, standalone lightbox plugins!
  2. One oft-requested feature had been the support for displaying Picasa albums with an access key. This is now available by means of the additional authkey parameter for the Picasa invocation. Note that Google Photos doesn’t have a public API, and the old Picasa API remains. If you have created an album in Google Photos, you cannot directly use its ID in the plugin. But you can go to your PicasaWeb account, and see the newly created album listed there. You will also notice that PicasaWeb offers 2 options for “Limited” sharing – restricted albums from Google Photos show up as “Limited”, while the classical PicasaWeb option of “Limited, anyone with the link” still exists. You will need to change the album’s security settings to “Limited, anyone with the link”, unless you want to make it public. You can then use the authkey parameter to show the album using Photonic, by including the secret authorization key provided by Google.
  3. There was an obscure issue that was resultant from having a “.” in the id of a gallery. I have addressed this, thanks to some very handy tips provided in the WP support forum.

Have fun!