1. Is it possible to show different thumbnail sizes, one for albums and one for the photos in the grid?
Yes – you can actually define the size that you want to use for each gallery individually. When you are building the gallery (using the “Add/Edit Photonic Gallery” button), once you have identified the layout, you get to pick the thumbnail size for the square / circular grid (or the tile size if you are using the Random Justified Grid / Masonry / Mosaic layouts).
2. As a side question (or somewhat related) do you have plans for any mobile specific settings? I’d like to keep the thumbnail sizes I have on desktop, but reduce them so I can fit more on a mobile (and reduce the need to scroll so much).
No, no plans for the requirement you have specifically outlined. But that being said, maybe there already is something in place to help you. You can specify a columns attribute for the square / circular thumbnail grid layouts (again, the option shows up right after you have selected the layout). There is, though, no way to control this by device type. To be honest I am not sure if it will be built, because the default behaviour of Photonic is the preferred behaviour for mobile in general (i.e. enlarge the images when they get too small). One other option to consider is to use the “Masonry” layout with a low trigger width (you can set this via Photonic → Settings → Generic Options → Layouts → Masonry Layout – Minimum Column Width).
3. Maybe a feature request… a ‘sticky’ close button for the overlay or mapping ESC to close it would be helpful!
I can consider making it sticky (no estimate as to when), but mapping “ESC” to it is tough / tricky, considering that it is used as the close shortcut for a lightbox as well. Capturing the keystroke might inadvertently cause the overlay to close when you are trying to close the lightbox.
Thanks for your detailed response!
Masonry looks like a good option and going to go with that! However I have the following problems…
1. All the albums are displayed out of the order (left to right) that they are in Google Photos (which worked perfectly in the grid layout). They are in order via column (all the way to the bottom of the page), but not left to right as expected?
2. The thumbnails are also blurry compared to the grid layout?
3. Selecting an album just leaves me with a spinner at the moment and no overlay loads (not sure if that is just my connection?).
1. All the albums are displayed out of the order (left to right) that they are in Google Photos (which worked perfectly in the grid layout). They are in order via column (all the way to the bottom of the page), but not left to right as expected?
Correct. Masonry is a top-down layout, so things are ordered vertically instead of horizontally.
2. The thumbnails are also blurry compared to the grid layout?
I believe you have set a tile size of 150 for your thumbnails, which is causing them to get scaled up. I would propose setting the tile size to something like 400 so that the image is small enough (to avoid heavy page load) and yet scales down instead of up, thereby not creating a blurred look.
3. Selecting an album just leaves me with a spinner at the moment and no overlay loads (not sure if that is just my connection?).
I noticed that you have a caching plugin active. Unfortunately the Google Photos API doesn’t play nicely with caching plugins. Basically Google Photos provides a short-lived redirection URL that ceases to be valid after around 30 minutes, so if you cache it, you start getting invalid links.
I would suggest disabling the caching plugin for this page and retrying this.
Thanks again for your reply!
I’ve changed to Mosaic layout now, as it scales pretty well and is in better order than Masonry (column order doesn’t really work for chronological albums). Changing the tile size has done the trick, thank you!
I’m still getting the spinner problem, no overlay loading. What I’ve done to try and resolve:
1. Cleared cache, disabled cache, completely uninstalled any caching plugins
2. Reinstalled Photonic
3. Created and configured a new Client ID, token etc. for authentication
4. Disabled all non-essential plugins (even ones that were active when it was last working)
5. Added another shortcode to the front page to load another gallery – same behaviour (just loading spinner).
Any other thoughts?
It looks like you have set a photo_count parameter of 200 – that needs to be 100 or lower. Google throws an error when you send a value greater than 100 (photo_count is the parameter where you specify the number of photos to list within an album), and as a result of that error the response is not being processed any further.
I will make a change to automatically reduce the number to 100 if it is greater than 100 so that such errors don’t occur.
Thank you Sayontan! All fixed and working now, I’ll tweak from here.
One thing that could be useful, ability to display the album title in the popup overlay (I could probably use some JS to do in the meantime).
Thanks again for the awesome plugin!
One thing that could be useful, ability to display the album title in the popup overlay (I could probably use some JS to do in the meantime).
Incidentally this is provided for the other sources (SmugMug, Flickr and Zenfolio). The challenge with Google is that a call to fetch photos in an album does not fetch the album information, and a call to fetch the album does not fetch the photos within the album. So this would necessitate 2 calls to Google – something that I avoided doing.
I might consider this in the future, but for now I don’t have plans to add this (another reason for this is that most users look to remove the header when it shows up).
