By default Photonic uses your lightbox image’s size (which, in your case, is the full-sized image) for display in the justified grid or mosaic layouts. One thing you can consider while constructing a gallery with these layouts is to make use of the “Tile size” feature. You can pick a tile size that is, say, the “Medium” image size. This way, when your page is being displayed, you will get medium size images, which are around 25% the size of the full-sized images most of the time, and that will make your page load considerably faster depending on how many images you are loading. The option to set a tile size shows up once you have picked your layout.
Now, for your other problem, note that photos from Google Photos cannot be cached. This is not a Photonic limitation – it is a Google Photos limitation, as Google gives short-life URLs for display. When you cache those URLs, they become invalid after 30 minutes. Consequently you cannot use JetPack image optimization or caching plugins on pages with Google Photos. You will have to disable those for pages that have Google Photos galleries.
Hello Sayontan, and thank you so much for replying so quickly on New Years Day.
So, I tried what you suggested and it definitely sped up the loading. One problem now is that using the ‘mosaic’ gallery function, even when I set the image size to ‘large’ instead of ‘full’, a few of the images show up blurry. Is there any way to limit the display size? (I made a google gallery with error images, you can look at them here: https://photos.app.goo.gl/ZA2gMRRZCyMDHUDo6)
Another problem is that, as before, in a few cases the gallery doesn’t load properly. You get one big image (now blurry), plus all the other images stacked over it in the upper right-hand corner.
You can check out the two galleries I edited here http://twosmall.ipower.com/murals/2019/05/27/the-guanyin-temple-of-guangen-fort/ and here http://twosmall.ipower.com/murals/2019/05/27/unnamed-zhenwu-temple-01/ – your fix mostly solves it, but the blurry images don’t look good…
Do you have any idea how to deal with these? Other than this, it works great…
best, and thanks so much, and happy new years,
– ht
My recommendation for solving the issue with blurry images would be to switch to a Justified Grid layout.
Basically both the layouts will expand to the full width of your content. But if you have fewer images, the probability of getting a single image in one row is higher for the Mosaic layout, and in such a case, the image will be resized to fit the content. For images larger than the content width this is not a problem, but for images smaller than the content width, the image gets stretched and will appear blurry. With a justified grid you are likely to have more than 1 image on almost all rows even if your gallery has only 4 photos, so this problem will not occur.
For your second issue one thing I am observing is that one of your images is not being found: https://i0.wp.com/twosmall.ipower.com/murals/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/DSC_4090.jpg?fit=6016%2C4016. This is the JetPack optimized image for DSC_4090.jpg. It is likely that not finding the image is causing a layout problem, though I cannot be sure.
Dear Sayontan –
OK, thanks for this. I reduced the tile image size to 1536×1536, which I think has eliminated both problems. Still not 100% sure it all works, but will let you know…
Thanks so much for your prompt replies!
