Photonic Album Limit

Can you be more specific? What type of limit are you referring to? Photonic imposes absolutely no limit whatsoever for any platform.

We have added 294 albums to the site and the plugin is not allowing any more to show up on the site. Let me get more details from the person who is in charge of adding the albums and see if I can get any more details.

I’ll be in touch.

Thanks!

We have added 294 albums to the site and the plugin is not allowing any more to show up on the site.

294 is too arbitrary a number for Photonic to use to block as something. In all likelihood you are exceeding your API quota for Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/services/developer/api/. Without a working website this seems like the most likely reason.

I am also puzzled as to why you need to add 294 albums separately. That seems like quite a bit of overhead technically and operationally. A much easier approach is to show groups of albums and then let users visit whichever ones they need to.

We’ve been using a Flickr API for almost 10 years now and have not run into this before.

Since we are in the process of rebuilding an older Joomla site (webcompanynearme.com) into WordPress at goflashwin.com, we have to add past albums hence the high number. The albums we are adding to the new site are older albums from the past few years that are already on the old site. This issue is baffling us since we have 10 years’ worth of images on the old site using the Flickr API and we are only able to add just shy of 2 years’ worth on this new site. Obviously, these are two different plugins and platforms, but the APIs are from the same source.

Any other suggestions would be helpful.

Thanks for all your help!
Tim

Without much of an insight into how you are building your site, it is impossible for me to figure out the problem. The only information I have is this:

We have added 294 albums to the site and the plugin is not allowing any more to show up on the site. Let me get more details from the person who is in charge of adding the albums and see if I can get any more details.

This doesn’t tell me enough to help effectively. Are you not able to see more than 294 in the wizard? Are you able to see more than 294, but the Wizard is not letting you create a shortcode? Are you able to insert the shortcode, but it is not showing a gallery on the front-end? Are your older galleries working? How are you creating your galleries? What makes you think that Photonic is imposing a limit?

As I have specified in a different response to you, I will need either a working URL, or screenshots of the problems you are facing.

Users have effectively used Photonic with > 500 albums, facing no issues, so I don’t see why something would be arbitrarily cut off at 294.

I apologize. I assumed you retained the logins I supplied last week. The site has been pulled out of Maintenance Mode temporarily so you can see the site. goflashwin.com

I just heard from my team, after further testing, it is not the number of albums but the age of the album. After choosing Photos From An Album/Photoset, then trying to search for any album prior to the Summer of 2021, the Wizzard is not finding them when on the Pick Your Album screen. We’ve tried several albums going all the way back to 2014. We also tried renaming them and the Wizzard still could not find them.

Here is a link to one of the older Flickr galleries that the Wizzard cannot find: https://www.flickr.com/photos/147017286@N06/albums/72157718304317747

For reference, this is a link to the old site showing the API pulling this same older album: https://webcompanynearme.com/index.php/2015-02-04-03-33-07/brookland-cayce/wrestling/item/9453?idx=1&albid=72157718304317747&back=itemlist

Any help is most appreciated!
Tim

• This reply was modified 2 years, 3 months ago by mothy5000.

Here’s what’s happening: Flickr is returning 500 albums in the search results. All 500 of those are displayed in the Wizard. I verified this by passing your user id to the Wizard on my side. But, the wizard is not showing you a “More” button to load more albums so that you can search through those (the wizard does this for Google Photos, where Google caps the list at 50).

Now, Flickr’s own documentation regarding this does not fully align with this behaviour:

page (Optional)
The page of results to get. Currently, if this is not provided, all sets are returned, but this behaviour may change in future.

per_page (Optional)
The number of sets to get per page. If paging is enabled, the maximum number of sets per page is 500.

What is happening is, though Photonic is not passing any paging parameter as a part of the request, Flickr is still capping the per_page to 500. This is something that seems to have changed recently on Flickr (to the point that their documentation is still old), and will need a code change from me to fix. It is not a difficult code change, but my work week just started, so I am not sure when I can get to it.

I do have a question, though: why not use Collections, and a different approach to show your albums? Basically, you can set up collections of albums in Flickr, one for each year, or something like that. The thing with collections, though, is that their API is very slow, and the more the albums in a collection, the worse it gets.

Now, once you have a collection, you can make use of a Photonic feature to show an album in a different page. To see this in action, look at the 3 examples in my documentation. In each of them, the display of the albums looks the same. However:

1. In Example 1, when you click on the album thumbnail, the photos within that album start displaying in a lightbox.
2. In Example 2, when you click on the album thumbnail, the photos show up in an overlay, and clicking on those, you get to the lightbox.
3. In Example 3 (the one I am recommending), the photos open in a separate page. The page automatically gets the title of the Flickr album, and if there is a description associated with it, that too can be displayed at the top. This is a very clean approach, and rather than creating several individual pages, you can get away with a handful of pages, each consisting several albums.

FYI, there is no issue on the front-end in pulling the photos from the album you listed. If you look at the way the shortcode is built, you simply need to pass the photoset_id parameter as photoset_id='72157718304317747'

I released a patch yesterday (version 2.83) that shows a “More” button in the wizard after the first 500 items.

This is great! Thanks!

I’ve discussed using Collections with the client before. They like the way the album version displays better.

Thanks for all your help!
Tim

I’ve discussed using Collections with the client before. They like the way the album version displays better.

There is no difference between the displays. You can display a set of albums (in a collection) the same way as the contents of the album. You can choose to remove the collection header and thumbnail as well, and have the collections expanded by default.