Photonic Version 1.68 – Google Photos and More “More”

Posted on July 29, 2018
Categories Plugin Releases

Version 1.68 of Photonic is now out. This version has the following changes:

  1. Google Photos API:
    Google announced that Picasa was shutting down in February 2016. Two years and three months later it finally introduced a new API for Google Photos in May 2018. As soon as it did so, a few features stopped working reliably in the Picasa API, notably the ability to see shared albums. To counter this I have built a module to support the new Google Photos API. Here are a few highlights:

    1. If you have used the Picasa module, your Client ID and Client Secret can be reused, but you have to perform a few additional steps and re-authenticate for Google Photos.
    2. Album ids in Picasa and Google Photos are different for the same albums, so a new helper has been provided for Google Photos.
    3. The Google Photos API is in a “Developer Preview” mode. This limits the number of API calls that can be made to 2500 a day. If you have a site with significantly more traffic consider sticking to the Picasa module.
    4. Video support in the API is very flaky. I have myself opened 1 bug report and 1 feature request with Google for videos in the API. Also, some lightboxes cannot handle videos from Google, viz. Fancybox and Featherlight (in addition to Image Lightbox, PrettyPhoto and Strip, which don’t support videos from any source). Do keep this in consideration before you decide to use Google Photos.
    5. Two things that Google Photos does very well are shared albums and filters. As mentioned above, shared albums hadn’t been working very well over the past two months with the Picasa API, and the Google Photos API seems to have ironed out all those kinks. In addition the Google Photos API provides the ability to filter by date and category.
  2. “More” Albums:
    One of the limitations of the Google Photos API is that it can return at the most 50 albums in one shot. For people with multiple albums this is obviously a challenge particularly since the Picasa API had no such limitation. So I introduced the ability to use the more='...' feature not just for Google Photos but for everything lest you come up against the limit for that provider. See the examples here.
  3. “More” within Nested Photos:
    One challenge with Photonic so far was that if you were displaying a collection of albums and clicked on one of them, the resultant display could not show more than a certain number of photos. With version 1.68 you can now use attributes photo_count and photo_more when you are showing an overlaid popup panel to show the entire set of photos incrementally. See the examples here.
  4. I fixed an issue where, if the global layout option was set to one of the slideshow options, clicking on an album’s thumbnail to display its photos was not showing anything.
  5. I have updated the Featherlight script to the latest version.

Happy photo-blogging!