Shared Albums for Google Photos vs Photogallery

Embed a Google Photos shared album directly from the source, without uploading copies to your WordPress media library. Add one shortcode, choose a gallery, slider, or carousel layout, and the plugin turns your album into a responsive photo experience for desktop and mobile visitors. It is built for photographers, bloggers, clubs, families, travel sites, event pages, and anyone who already organizes photos in Google Photos and wants to show them beautifully on a WordPress site. Why Install It No duplicate uploads – Keep your photos in Google Photos and show them on your WordPress site. Less gallery maintenance – Update the album at the source instead of rebuilding galleries by hand. A better visitor experience – Give people a responsive gallery, slider, carousel, fullscreen view, or lightbox. Photo and video support – Share mixed albums without splitting them into separate WordPress galleries. Mobile-friendly browsing – Let visitors swipe, tap, zoom, navigate, and enjoy slideshows naturally. Useful presentation options – Show descriptions, dates, counters, buttons, and image details when they help. Built for real albums – Caching, lazy loading, and progressive loading help larger albums stay practical. Why People Use It Google Photos is convenient for storing and sharing albums. WordPress is where your audience is. This plugin connects the two. Instead of exporting photos, uploading them to the media library, rebuilding galleries, and repeating the work after every album change, you can share the Google Photos album once and embed it where you need it. What Happens After Installing The plugin adds its own WordPress admin menu with a friendly Guide page, ready-to-use examples, a live shortcode playground, and the current parameter reference. Start with a sample, paste your own Google Photos share link, preview the result, and place the shortcode where you want the album to appear. Community Inspiration The optional Community Directory helps you discover what other users are building with the plugin. Browse real shortcode examples for layout ideas. Copy a configuration and adapt it to your own album. Rate useful examples and share your own. Add a sample page URL if you want curious visitors to find your site. Community features are optional. You can use the gallery plugin without joining or publishing anything. Community Acknowledgements This plugin has been shaped not only by code, but also by people willing to test early versions, question design decisions, and explain their real-world needs. Their ideas and thoughtful feedback continue to make it more useful and easier to use. Special Recognition Naveen Bachwani (@naveenbachwani) – An early adopter with a sharp eye and analytical mind. His feedback often improved usability while new features were still being designed, before they reached a public release. His many feature ideas, extensive testing, UX feedback, and detailed design discussions have helped shape photo information and descriptions, mobile and Fullscreen behavior, the Community Directory, and the current Lightbox and Fullscreen experience. Personal note: It has been a genuine pleasure working with you, Naveen! Key Contributors Peter Berger (@peterpolow) – Detailed feature requests and patient real-device testing that helped drive video support, Gallery mode, separate inline and Fullscreen controls, and more discoverable button behavior on iPhone and other mobile devices. Ulf (@toonwolf) – Real-world testing and thoughtful presentation requests based on using the plugin for digital signage on a screen in his tennis club cafe. Additional Acknowledgements Valter Bruno (@valterbruno) – The original Lightbox feature request and continued real-world testing of the plugin and its shortcode workflow. Luis (@luisbenitez777) – The request to support mosaic thumbnails in Fullscreen, which became the Fullscreen mosaic feature. Mateusz Starzak (GitHub @matiaspl) – A public fork that inspired the original mosaic feature. GMRobbins (@gmrobbins) – An early usability review that led to clearer onboarding and helped inspire Gallery mode and the carousel-to-single experience. Credits Uses Swiper – MIT License Uses Plyr – MIT License Privacy Policy This plugin does not collect or store any user data for its core gallery functionality. Use of external Google services The plugin fetches public Google Photos album pages from https://photos.google.com and image files from *.googleusercontent.com in order to render the galleries. Only publicly shared album links are supported; the plugin has no access to private albums or any content that is not already available via a public share link. The plugin does not collect, store, or transmit user credentials or personal data. It only caches album HTML and image URLs in WordPress transients for performance, and this cache is stored locally in your WordPress database. Community Directory (optional, opt-in) The Community Directory is optional. Browsing samples loads public examples from sa.janzeman.com. Sign-in, ratings, and publishing are used only when you choose to connect to the community. If you publish an entry, the community service stores the information you submit, such as title, shortcode, description, tags, optional sample page URL, and optional display name. You can delete your community account from the plugin admin page. The community backend does not use cookies, analytics, advertising, or newsletters. Support Bug reports: Open an issue on GitHub Feature requests: Post on the support forum Privacy, account, or sensitive questions: email [email protected] Leave a rating: Review on WordPress.org Buy Me a Coffee: buymeacoffee.com/janzeman

This plugin is meant primarily for theme developers. This plugin allows to collect photos from the the Media Manager and arrange them into albums. These albums can be combined into galleries. Both albums and galleries can be added to a theme’s navigation menu. Note that this plugin does not provide any CSS formatting and JavaScript for frontend presentation of galleries and albums. You have to format them yourself and integrate necessary JavaScript libraries, e.g Lightbox, yourself. This plugin merely gives a framework for gallery and album creation via custom post types and registration of designs for a frontend presentation. If you found a bug or have any questions, complains or suggestions please feel free to contact me. Theme Integration You have to write post type template files for your theme in order for an album or gallery to work. This gives Theme developers the most control over a frontend presentation and users a convenient way to create galleries through the WordPress dashboard. If you install this plugin, create albums and galleries and include them into your theme’s menu, you will be disappointed, since nothing will happen. Create two php files inside your theme’s directory: single-photogallery.php and single-photoalbum.php. single-photogallery.php gets called everytime a gallery is about to be viewed single-photoalbum.php gets called everytime a album is about to be viewed Now you have two options. You can register a custom design inside your theme’s function.php via e.g $kt_Photogallery->register_gallery_design() and call $kt_Photogallery->render() at an appropriated place inside your single-photogallery.php to render it depending on the user’s choice. You fetch albums, images and thumbnail details, and render consistent HTML for all albums and galleries. Refere to the PHP API section for further details on how to retrieve album IDs, image IDs and thumbnail details. Example A basic example for a custom gallery design # functions.php $kt_Photogallery->register_gallery_design ('my_gallery_design', array( 'label' => __('My Gallery Design', 'my-textdomain'), 'icon' => 'dashicons-format-gallery', 'title' => __('This is my custom gallery design', 'my-textdomain'), 'render' => 'render_my_gallery_design' )); $kt_Photogallery->register_album_design ('my_album_design', array( 'label' => __('My Album Design', 'my-textdomain'), 'icon' => 'dashicons-format-image', 'title' => __('This is my custom album design', 'my-textdomain'), 'render' => 'render_my_album_design' )); function render_my_gallery_design ($post) { global $kt_Photogallery; $album_IDs = $kt_Photogallery->get_albums($post); if ($album_IDs) { foreach ($album_IDs as $album_ID) { $album_thumbnail = $kt_Photogallery->get_thumbnail_src($album_ID); echo ' '; if ($album_thumbnail) { echo ' '; } echo ' '; } } else { printf(__('The gallery %s does not contain any albums', 'my-textdomain'), esc_html($post->post_title)); } } function render_my_album_design ($post) { global $kt_Photogallery; $image_IDs = $kt_Photogallery->get_images($post); if ($image_IDs) { foreach ($image_IDs as $image_ID) { $image = get_post($image_ID); if ($image) { $image_src = wp_get_attachment_image_src($image_ID, 'medium'); if (!$image_src) { $image_src = wp_get_attachment_image_src($image_ID, 'full'); } echo ' '; } } } else { printf(__('The album %s does not contain any images', 'my-textdomain'), esc_html($post->post_title)); } } Basic integration into Twenty Fifteen: # single-photogallery.php or single-photoalbum.php get_header(); ?> ', ' '); ?> render(); ?> get_album_count ( [$gallery_ID] ) Returns the number of albums associated with a gallery Argument int|null $gallery_ID Optional – ID of a gallery. Defaults to the current ID if used inside the Loop Returns integer|boolean – Returns an integer on success, or false if $gallery_ID yields no gallery $kt_Photogallery->get_albums ( [$gallery_ID] ) Returns an array of album IDs associated with a gallery. Argument int|null $gallery_ID Optional – ID of a gallery. Defaults to the current ID if used inside the Loop Returns array|boolean – Returns an array of IDs on success, false if $gallery_ID yields no gallery $kt_Photogallery->get_image_count ( [$album_ID] ) Returns the number of images associated with an album Argument int|null $album_ID Optional – ID of an album. Defaults to the current ID if used inside the Loop Returns integer|boolean – Returns an integer on success, or false if $album_ID yields no album $kt_Photogallery->get_images ( [$album_ID] ) Returns an array of image IDs associated with an album. Argument int|null $album_ID Optional – ID of an album. Defaults to the current ID if used inside the Loop Returns array|boolean – Returns an array of IDs on success, false if $album_ID yields no album $kt_Photogallery->get_thumbnail ( [$album_ID, [$fallback] ] ) Returns the ID of the image (attachment) used as thumbnail for an album Argument int|null $album_ID Optional – ID of an album. Defaults to the current ID if used inside the Loop Argument boolean $fallback Optional – if true and $album_ID yields no album the method returns the ID of the first image associated with the album. Default is true Returns integer|false – Returns an integer on success, false if $album_ID yields no album, no thumbnail is set or a fallback could not been resolved $kt_Photogallery->get_thumbnail_src ( [$album_ID, [$fallback] ] ) Returns an ordered array with values corresponding to the (0) url, (1) width, (2) height and (3) scale of the thumbnail associated with an album. Argument int|null $album_ID Optional – ID of an album. Defaults to the current ID if used inside the Loop Argument boolean $fallback Optional – if true and $album_ID yields no album the method returns the ID of the first image associated with the album. Default is true Returns array|false – Returns an array on success, false if $album_ID yields no album, no thumbnail is set or a fallback could not been resolved $kt_Photogallery->register_album_design ( $key, $options ) $kt_Photogallery->register_gallery_design ( $key, $options ) Registers a custom design for albums and galleries respectively. The design will be available in the Design metabox during editing Returns boolean – returns true if the design was registered successfully, false on failure. Argument string $key Required – A key used as id inside HTML/CSS and for general identification Argument callable|array $options Required – A callback rendering the design on the frontend or an associative array: string label – The text for the label string icon – The image shown next to the label. Can be dashicons-*, an URL to an image or a base 64 encoded image string title – Text used inside the HTML title attribute, usually containing a description callback render ($post, $options) – Callback rendering the design on the frontend. The arguments passed are the current post as a WP_Post instance and an associative array of the options straight from the database callback options ($current_options, $defaults, $post) – Callback for additional form fields, should echo HTML. The arguments passed are an associative array of the options straight from the database, the default options as second argument and the current post as a WP_Post instance as third. array defaults – Associative array containing default values for options. Its keys are used during saving so you should generate HTML form fields using its keys and provide a callback for filtering. callback filter ($current_options, $defaults, $post) – Callback for filtering the options before they are saved. This callback is called every time a post is saved. The arguments passed are the default options merged with the values from the current request, the default options as second argument and the current post as a WP_Post instance as third. The callback must return an associative array otherwise no options are stored. $kt_Photogallery->render( [$auto_design] ) Main output method. Depending on the current post type the method prints out a design for a gallery or an album. Argument boolean auto_design optional – If set true and no design is found, take the first registered one and proceed. Default is true Returns boolean – Returns true on success, false otherwise