Photonic Version 2.01 – PhotoSwipe and Minor Fixes

I have released version 2.01 of Photonic a few minutes back. Thankfully my tests for version 2.00 paid off and I didn’t receive any overwhelming bug reports. Correspondingly these are the changes for this release:

  1. PhotoSwipe
    Photonic now has support for its twelfth lightbox – PhotoSwipe. This was a long-pending request which I finally was able to support. PhotoSwipe is rated very highly among developers for being light, modular etc. However my thoughts are different – PhotoSwipe is built to be used without JQuery, and as a result its core size is quite big (41KB of JS). This would be fine if sites didn’t use JQuery, but most WP themes and plugins use it. As a result there is no bandwidth saved by the script for more than 90% of the cases, instead the script ends up being larger than it should have been. Consequently, a lot of things like the lightbox markup are not included in the script and have to be handled by developers implementing the script.

    In any case, despite its quirks almost everything has been supported in Photonic using PhotoSwipe, except for Flickr videos.

  2. Instagram had changed (again) how high-resolution images can be accessed, so I had to tweak the code for the same. Consequently I have removed the explicitly defined sizes for HD images and replaced it with an option, “Largest”. This will automatically pull the image with the highest resolution.
  3. In 2.00 I had added a feature to allow searching for images in SmugMug. Unfortunately this ended up not respecting the album’s native sort order. I have fixed this issue.

Do let me know of your feedback regarding the Interactive Workflow – I would love to hear your thoughts! As always, if you like Photonic and the support you receive, a good review is greatly appreciated!