Gallery display issues

  • Resolved marsrhodos

    (@marsrhodos)


    5 years, 3 months ago

    Hi – We’ve been noticing some strange gallery display issues over the past week (since March 1/21). Intermittently, galleries won’t load – the “loading” (rotating wheel) graphic displays on the page but the galleries never load. This has been observed by several users in different physical locations using various browsers. On my machine, the galleries loaded fine under Chrome but hung under Firefox.

    I rolled back the version, but that didn’t change anything. So I reloaded the current version and everything seemed to work yesterday; but this morning the galleries failed to load again. Then a few hours later, they loaded fine. I checked, and this isn’t a network connectivity issue or a browser-specific problem (other users reported it hanging under Chrome even though it worked fine with Chrome on my machine). There have been no recent updates to WordPress, the theme, or other plugins, and my browsers are all using the most recent versions. I could access Google photos and the associated albums via both browsers without any problem, so I don’t think it’s an access issue.

    Also, I’ve been using Photonic to create galleries for a year now, and I always use the Justified Grid layout with the same default settings. Up until now, it has always displayed thumbnails with a fixed row height and random widths (which is what I expected and want). But today when I looked at https://marsrhodos.ca/whats-blooming/whats-blooming-2020_04/, some of the gallery thumbnail rows were much taller than the others, resulting in a weird stretched appearance. (When I clicked on the thumbnail, the photos still displayed with the correct aspect ratio in the lightbox.) That page hasn’t been modified since last April, so something must be going on with the plugin.

    Any ideas what might be happening?

    Thanks!

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Plugin Author Sayontan Sinha

    (@sayontan)

    5 years, 3 months ago

    While it took a bit of time, all your galleries loaded up. I would put down any inconsistency you have observed to a glitch in Google.

    But it does look like Google has some data messed up for some of your photos (that is causing the aspect ratio problem).

    In any case, to go back to the old behaviour, change this setting: Photonic → Settings → Google Photos → Google Photos settings → Layout processing mode. Set it to “Use JS unless overridden by a gallery individually”.

    One suggestion: you seem to be loading way too much data on your pages, which you might want to reconsider. Each gallery has several images, each of which is loaded at full res in the justified grid. You might want to use the “Tile Size” setting while constructing the gallery, and use something like tile_size="400". That will make your page considerably faster.

    Thread Starter marsrhodos

    (@marsrhodos)

    5 years, 3 months ago

    Thank you so much for your quick reply, and for the helpful hint for tile size! 🙂

    At first glance it does look like a glitch in Google, but I’ve gathered some more data that makes things a bit more confusing. Here’s what I’ve discovered so far:

    Our problems began on March 1, the day I updated the Photonic plugin to 2.71.

    As I mentioned before, the connection issue is sporadic and only seems to occur on some browsers sometimes (the worst type of problem to troubleshoot, grr). In my case, Chrome always loads without difficulty but Firefox has problems. Other users have reported the problems on Chrome and Safari.

    It sounds as though you weren’t able to recreate the exact problem we’re having, probably because it’s intermittent. The page isn’t just slow to load, it actually hangs – I have left it for several hours and it never successfully loaded the galleries.

    The confusing part of this problem is that (for example) the galleries on https://marsrhodos.ca/whats-blooming/ won’t load, but they all load correctly from the March, February, and January 2021 links on this page: https://marsrhodos.ca/whats-blooming/. So it seems unlikely that it’s a Google access problem. The shortcodes are identical in both pages, it’s just that the galleries will load on one page and not on another. The content of both pages is very simple otherwise, just a couple of sentences of text.

    For further testing, I used Firefox and went to https://marsrhodos.ca/whats-blooming-archived-galleries/ and clicked on each link. Ten pages loaded normally, and three hung on load:
    https://marsrhodos.ca/whats-blooming-2020_04/
    https://marsrhodos.ca/whats-blooming/whats-blooming-2020_06/
    https://marsrhodos.ca/whats-blooming/whats-blooming-2020_10/

    Here’s what I did:

    1) I rolled back the Photonic version to 2.70 and hard-refreshed the pages, but nothing changed.

    2) I switched to Google photos and checked that all the photos and albums for those months displayed as usual. There was no problem directly accessing those Google Photos albums via Firefox.

    3) I removed sharing from all April albums in Google photos. This normally doesn’t affect how the galleries display – some of the other months’ albums are shared; others are not; and the galleries display on our pages without a problem regardless. When I hard-refreshed the page, the loading delay went back to normal, but none of the photos displayed. Instead, the gallery displayed a grid of “no access” icons (rectangle within a circle – I can send screenshots if you like).

    4) Even though the photos didn’t display, the correct tooltip for each photo still popped up when I hovered over the corresponding “no access” icon, and when I clicked on the thumbnails, the lightbox opened showing the correct caption, but no photo.

    5) Then I restored the sharing on one album, but despite doing a hard refresh on the page, the gallery of “no access” icons remained for that album. (I.e. The page didn’t go back to hanging on load.)

    6) As a further experiment, I rearranged the photos in the Google album and hard-refreshed the page. The position of the corresponding tooltip in the “no access” grid didn’t update (so it was still using the previous version of the album).

    7) I updated Photonic to 2.71 again. Then the galleries all loaded correctly, and they are currently working. BUT… I rolled back to 2.70 and then upgraded to 2.71 last night, too. The galleries worked last night after reloading 2.71, but by this morning they had stopped working.

    Right now (after updating to 2.71 a couple of hours ago), all three of the above “problem pages” are currently working again, but the original problem has recurred: The galleries on https://marsrhodos.ca/whats-blooming/ won’t load, but they all load correctly from the March, February, and January 2021 links on this page: https://marsrhodos.ca/whats-blooming/.

    Sorry for the LONG text of this, but the fact that the galleries are loading normally from one page but not from another on the same browser is very confusing. I hope you can help…

    Thanks!

    Plugin Author Sayontan Sinha

    (@sayontan)

    5 years, 3 months ago

    Thanks for the detailed explanation and the steps to reproduce.

    One thing that immediately stood out was this: pages stopped working after a certain amount of time. When this happens, almost always the culprit is the caching setup. Basically Google Photos’ URLs have a short life – they expire after around 35 minutes. So, if you cache your page’s markup, the markup automatically becomes invalid a little while later. This problem exists only for Google Photos.

    In looking at your page’s source code I couldn’t determine if you are using caching. Maybe you are, which is why the content fetching is happening pretty fast. Otherwise, Google Photos has an API that is slower than Flickr’s or SmugMug’s.

    You might not have a caching plugin, rather you might have caching enabled on your server. Even that would cause a problem.

    There are two ways to resolve this:

    1. Disable caching for the pages with Google Photos – this may or may not be easy. It depends on what you are using for caching.
    2. Alternatively, load the galleries in Photonic via a JavaScript loading method – this would require you to change a setting: Photonic → Settings → Generic Options → Advanced → Loading Mode. You can set it to “JavaScript” from the default PHP. This will not generate the gallery markup when your page is being fetched. Rather, it will generate the gallery once the rest of your page has rendered. Note that this is different from the option in my previous post.
    Thread Starter marsrhodos

    (@marsrhodos)

    5 years, 3 months ago

    Thank you so much for your help and patience! 🙂 I changed to the JavaScript loading method yesterday and so far everything seems to be working fine. Fingers crossed…

    Thanks again!

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

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