Suggestions
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I have a couple of suggestions!
How about adding IMGUR as an image source? With flickr disappearing, IMGUR seems a good alternative and appears to be very hosting friendly. Google is great (and the Helper is awesome!) but Google are fickle.. it could all go away tomorrow.
And I’d love to have a layout with a filmstrip of thumbnails across the bottom of the page, which when clicked opened the image fullscreen on the page, not in a lightbox…
Cheers,
Dave
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Not sure I understood your second request. How would you get your filmstrip at the bottom of a page … without launching some sort of a slideshow / lightbox? Note that there are various lightboxes that support “filmstrips”, such as LightGallery, or PrettyPhoto, or Fancybox2 (or Fancybox3, which will be in the next release), and I know for a fact that LightGallery (and Fancybox3) support full-screen displays out of the box, while it is easy to switch most of the lightboxes to full-screen modes without modifying the lightbox script code.
Do you have a demo of what you would like to achieve? Or can you help explain it better?
Regarding IMGUR, I am not sure I have the bandwidth. Basically, for every extension I build, I have to factor in several things. To list a few:
- Level 0 items – standalone photos (and videos from the next release), if the API supports it
- Level 1 items – a group of photos (and videos from the next release), provided by searches, tags, dates, albums, photosets, galleries etc. Support generally has to be built for all variations here. E.g. Flickr supports tags, searches, photosets (now called albums) and galleries, and capbilities have to be incorporated for each of these.
- Level 2 items – a group of albums / photosets / galleries etc.
- Level 3 items – a group of folders (in SmugMug) or Collections (in Flickr) or Groups (in Zenfolio)
- Password-protection and privacy filters
- All nuances of titles, captions, descriptions etc.
- Suitability with all lightboxes – this might seem like a very simple thing, but the reality is quite far from it! E.g. if an API returns a URL without an extension, different lightboxes get hosed.
- Authentication – this is by far the hardest item to handle, more so since providers tend to mix things up a bit. E.g. back in 2016 Instagram threw out every semblance of sense that they had and broke hundreds of thousands of third-party apps by changing their authentication model. Then Google did something similar with their authentication model. Both of these changes required significant rewrites at my end. SmugMug deprecated its old API and introduced a new one with a completely different authentication model, and this needed a lot of testing and efforts to resolve at my end. Even now some of their things just don’t behave that well, though I have got suitable workarounds.
The list is by no means complete – I basically have to do an armada of testing when I introduce a new provider (or even a new feature for that matter), and what makes it harder is that my very demanding day job has nothing to do with WordPress. So, when a provider changes the API, I stand the risk of being unable to react to a change in time. It doesn’t help that I like being thorough and I make my products full-featured, so this only adds to the time :-).
The above doesn’t mean that I will not consider supporting IMGUR or other providers. Sometimes there is a lull at work for a few months, and I often get a lot of work done then. But otherwise it is all I can do to respond to support queries.
BTW, I don’t believe Flickr is disappearing. Their takeover by SmugMug will mean some consolidation and some API tweaks, but your photos will still remain (they might move to SmugMug or vice versa). It is also likely that SmugMug will adopt Flickr’s API, which incidentally is the most robust API I have seen and apart from their implementation of collections they do everything beautifully.
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