Excellent plug-in

Many thanks for the feedback!

These are nice suggestions, but while some of them (e.g. the first one) are easy to implement, the others are not necessarily so.

But there are users who have come up with reasonable workarounds. Before I begin, I will refer you to this post.

It all comes down to how you are creating your galleries. If you are creating individual pages, each with one gallery showing one album, the easiest way is to follow the approach in the linked post. Basically:

1. Create a template for your shortcode, e.g.:
   [gallery type='google' view='photos' layout='random' count='100' more='More' title_position='none' album_id='...']
2. Obviously you can tailor the above template to your satisfaction, e.g. put in the value you prefer for more, set title_position to whatever you wish to have (the list of values can be found under Photonic → Getting Started → The Secret Menu). Some of these can be controlled via the settings and don’t need to be explicitly specified, e.g. layout can be set via Photonic → Settings → Generic Options → Layouts → Image Layout
3. You can get the list of all your albums via Photonic → Helpers, and dump this out to an excel sheet. You can subsequently generate the template shortcode above by substituting the album_id as appropriate, and paste the shortcode wherever you wish.

The above approach is a lot more effective than individually creating galleries using the “Add / Edit Photonic Gallery” button – that process requires a lot more clicks but is more suitable if you want to create a single gallery. Nonetheless you can use the button to first create the shortcode to your satisfaction, then use it as your template by plugging in the album ids as you desire.

Now, specifically addressing your points:

1. – Disable titles on thumbnails without having to select on every gallery creation.

   If you use the shortcode copy-pasting approach, this gets addressed. That being said, this particular feature is very easy for me to provide. If you notice, under Photonic → Settings → Google Photos → Photos (Main page), there is an option for Photo Title Display – I just need to add the option to this list and it will get applied to every gallery where you don’t explicitly specify the value.

2. – Disable title/description view in lightbox addons

   This is considerably harder, as the title display is integral to the markup of most lightboxes. That being said, I think there might be a bug in the code because the title is showing up even if the thumbnails don’t have it (I don’t think that should be happening – I need to refer to my old notes). The other side of this is, you can hide the title via CSS if required. Of course, the markup differs by lightbox, so you can open a support request for the lightbox that you are using I can provide you with the CSS for it.

3. – have the ‘More’ button auto add itself for galleries from Google Photos with more than 100 photos.

   This is almost impossible to manage via code (mainly because Photonic is built around explicit user decisions as opposed to the plugin making assumptions), but if you use the shortcode template I have given above, it will perform this function automatically. My shortcode will attempt to show 100 photos in one shot, and show the “More” button if you have more than 100. If you have less than 100, the button will not show up.

4. – Predefine the text of the More button so that it is easily made consistent across a site.

   Again, you can do this via the shortcode template approach. This is not particularly hard to implement at my end though, but it hasn’t been a requested feature until this point.

5. – Would also like to have the option to force the plug-in to load the entire gallery from Google even if it has more than 100 photos as my site is low traffic and has almost zero chance of hitting googles daily limit. This could be added with the caveat message beside the setting.

   This I cannot offer. Here is some background: I tried implementing this for Instagram once, and as soon as I ran it in my development environment, Instagram locked me out for an hour (I have less than 100 photos, so this was a shocker). For that period of time any site using Photonic for Instagram wasn’t able to access its photos since my API key was suspected to be using the API in a “spammy” manner. This is always tricky ground to negotiate with behemoths such as Google or Facebook, and can sometimes trigger very undesirable results for end-users.

   Given that Photonic relies on goodwill reviews on this site and this site alone, a sudden lockout by Google is likely to cause a flood of negative reviews. As it is, the Google module of Photonic garners most of the negative reviews. 4 out of the 5 1-star reviews from the past 2 years pertain to the difficulty of obtaining a Google Client ID, including the one right before yours (note that the culprit here is Google’s convoluted process, not Photonic itself, but that doesn’t stop negative reviews).

Thanks for all the feedback. The predefined shortcode seems ideal, I wasn’t previously aware that the more button only appears if there is more than 100 photos and doesnt if there is less. I thought from what the plug-in showed that the button would always show if it was specified.

With regards to 5, I fully understand, again thanks.