Feed disappears after a while

The only fix I found is to refresh/updating the page the feed is on then it shows the photos from the album.

I cannot say without a live URL, but it is likely that this is being caused by a caching plugin that you are using. Google Photos’ URLs are short-lived and they expire after around 30 minutes. If you have a caching plugin, that stores the content of your page including the URLs of your photos… which cease to be valid after 30 minutes.

There are two solutions:

1. Exclude these pages from your caching plugin’s scope. Most good caching plugins offer you this capability.
2. There is another solution offered within Photonic – to use the JavaScript loading mode. You can set this up from Photonic → Settings → Generic Options → Advanced → Loading Mode. This will pull the gallery after the page has loaded. While this is a very good solution, if your gallery is near the top of the page, this will cause what is called “Cumulative Layout Shift” (it will push subsequent content down). The CLS doesn’t affect you if your gallery is some way down, but if it is at the top of your page, it can affect your SEO score.

A second question is how can I make it so the shortcode feed updates within minutes of me updating the album on google photos? Right now I just found refresh updating the page makes the feed update.

Same answer as above. In fact this makes me certain that you are using a caching plugin.

On the second part generally how often does the plugin call from Google Photos, every 30 mins? Is there a way to make that faster?

Photonic never calls Google Photos by itself. It only makes the call if your page is loaded – that is why, for default Photonic behaviour your galleries are updated instantaneously without your having to change anything in WP. When you cache, you save the snapshot of your page as of that point in time. So, if you are caching the markup but you are changing your galleries, the only way for you to see those changes is to re-save your page.

The other alternative is what I suggested – using the JS loading mode. I use it on my site even though I don’t use a caching plugin, because it is considerably faster.