Default Google Photo View

Hi,
Unfortunately posting an email address here is banned.

That being said, are you looking for something like this? This will show you the photos within an album directly on the page.

One quick question: you have mentioned that the instructions for the API have changed a bit from my published walkthrough. Can you point me to the specific steps in the documentation that need correction? I reran through all the points and they seem to align with the screenshots. Maybe I have a different setup?

Yes, that layout is what I’m hoping for, but will the photos show after clicking into the album link, or will they repopulate the gallery on the page? Also, will that code need modification for each album added or will it pickup new album adds automatically? Thank you.

As I walked through it you’re right, I just wandered off onto additional pages of the API settings at Google. I get lost sometimes on the menu system. PS: left five star review, this is a great plugin and I bought you a couple of cups of coffee!

Ah, I see what you are asking now – you want all the albums to be present on a page and auto-expanded to show all photos. Photonic specifically doesn’t have any setting for that.

This is mainly due to performance reasons, which might not apply to you directly. Let me explain why:

1. It takes one call to fetch a listing of albums. Google Photos is stingy with what it returns (a maximum of 50 albums in one shot, unlike say Flickr that can return 500). So if you have more than 50 albums, more calls have to be made to fetch the entire list.
2. For each album returned, it takes another call to fetch the photos. Google (and in this case no provider) can return photos unless the album is explicitly requested. So if you have 30 albums, this is going to make 31 calls in total to fetch your albums and photos, while for most cases I just have to make one call (unless I am dealing with nested structures like Flickr Collections, SmugMug folders, or Zenfolio Groups). Having additional calls can noticeably increase lag on your page.
3. Now here is the clincher – the Google Photos API is currently in a Developer Preview mode. This is because they are ironing out a lot of kinks in the API at the moment (I myself have raised 3 bugs and 1 feature request for them). The main limitation of the developer preview is that it limits you to 2500 API calls a day. So if your page has 30 albums (and 31 calls) and receives 83 visits in a day, the 84th visit will start returning errors!

So I have an alternative proposal for you: consider using an interim popup. You can configure this via settings under Photonic → Settings → Generic Options → Overlaid Popup Panel → Enable Interim Popup for Album Thumbnails, or for a gallery explicitly by passing an additional popup='show' parameter to the shortcode.

Now your albums shortcode will still operate as you currently have it. Any new albums will get automatically added. And when a user clicks on an album thumbnail, instead of seeing the lightbox directly, (s)he will first be shown an overlay with all the photos in the album, which can then be clicked individually to show a lightbox. This keeps your requests on demand, the same way that you have right now. In other words, there is one call to fetch the album listing, and one call per album that is clicked.

BTW, thanks for the review and the coffee!

I’ve tried the solution but it does not work. Likely it’s particular to my implementation within at tab (all albums are being called from tabs with each tab representing a year). When adding the popup the album image cover stays in place and the popup gallery is behind and above this image (I set the popup to be in the middle of the page). Here is the short code:

[gallery type="google" view='albums' access='all' media='all' more='More' photo_count='20' layout='mosaic' thumb_size='150' crop_thumb='no-crop' main_size='900' controls='show' popup='show']

Wondering if I’ve implemented conflicting options…

A link to a page would really help, if you can provide one.

I’m going to temporarily remove the password protection (I’ve disabled the popup): here is the page https://www.swimminwomen.com/photos-and-videos-2/

Still shows up with password protection. Also can you add back the popup?

Will do, it’s run via Cloudflare so it may have a cached version. It’s off on mine after cache clear. Popup reimplemented.

OK. In your WP Dashboard, under Appearance → Customize → Additional CSS add this:

.photonicModalOverlay {
    top: 50px;
    z-index: 10;
}

Unable to save due to “2 invalid settings.” Not sure what that from…

I’ll try to add to child theme…

Does it save without this code?

Added to child theme…no difference. I’m pretty sure it’s related to the code being within a tab.