Photonic Version 1.58 – Deep-Linking, Social Sharing, and A Happy New Year!

Posted on December 29, 2016
Categories Plugin Releases

At the cusp of the new year, I have released a new version of Photonic with some big, and difficult changes.

  1. Deep-Linking
    This has been a very, very difficult thing to implement. Every image in a Photonic gallery is now assigned a unique id, which, when appended to the URL, is called a deep-link. This was pretty easy to implement. But, when you open an image in a lightbox, the URL in the browser should change to reflect its id, and when you navigate using the lightbox, the URL should change to reflect the new image. And when someone opens this deep-link in a browser, it should automatically launch the image in a lightbox. This was the hard part, thanks to the different lightboxes and scenarios that I had to account for. You can control deep-linking from Photonic → Settings → Generic Options → Generic Settings → Deep Linking. That being said, a couple of things don’t work:

    1. I couldn’t get it working for Fancybox. But I did get it working for Fancybox2. So it works for Swipebox, PrettyPhoto, Colorbox and Fancybox2. If you are curious about using Fancybox2 as your lightbox, see this.
    2. If you are diplaying an album as a thumbnail, and upon clicking it, it launches a slideshow, the deep-links for the images show up in the browser. However, if you provide this link to someone, it will not automatically launch the image in a lightbox. For all other scenarios the lightbox opens up correctly.

    This brings me to the next big change …

  2. Social Sharing
    When you open a deep-link in the browser and the lightbox shows up, it will show you sharing icons for Facebook, Twitter and Google+. You can then share deep-linked image, which will let others access your photos directly. Social sharing can be controlled from Photonic → Settings → Generic Options → Generic Settings → Social media integration, and will not be active.
  3. Other Changes
    1. Another big change is the addition of “Bypass popup” support to all lightboxes supported by Photonic. Previously Photonic supported this mode in Swipebox and PrettyPhoto only, but now it is available in Fancybox, Colorbox and Fancybox2 as well. This is on by default, and you can switch it off from Photonic → Settings → Generic Options → Popup Panel → Enable Interim Popup for Album Thumbnails.
    2. I have added a hook, photonic_modify_title to apply a different title for photos.
    3. I have enhanced the support for Fancybox2, amongst third-party lightboxes, adding popup bypassing, thumbnail and touch gesture support.
    4. In case an image has no title, and lightbox linking is disabled, the plugin will now not show the “View” text in the lightbox.
    5. I have fixed a Smugmug bug that was causing the album headers to show up twice.
    6. There were Fancybox styling issues in certain themes, like Twenty Fifteen and Twenty Sixteen, which I have addressed.
    7. A while back Smugmug had introduced some new image sizes – I have got them added to the options.

Deep-linking and Social Media Integration is only available in expensive premium lightboxes, so I am happy to be able to bring this to you for free.

Hope you like this release, and have a Great New Year!