Have I made an error somewhere, or is there really an issue with Picasa being deprecated?
Picasa is gone. Google deprecated it late last week. Unfortunately this is not in my control, and there is no way (not just for me, but for any third party provider) to get around it. You will have to switch to the Google Photos API for it.
Google introduced the Google Photos API in May 2018, and Photonic added support for it in July 2018. At the time of adding support I had mentioned this in my Picasa documentation:
Also note that while Google hasn’t officially announced the date for phasing out the Picasa API, it will be phased out once the Google Photos API is more stable.
That has finally happened, and Google killed Picasa for good.
Note that the switch to Google Photos in Photonic is not very difficult, but it is not a “one-click-and-done” activity either:
- First, reauthenticate for Google Photos. While some of these steps are already done as a part of your existing Picasa module, you have to specifically enable the id for Google Photos and then reauthenticate.
- Then, rebuild each of your galleries one by one using Google Photos. Hopefully the “Add / Edit Photonic Gallery” button that you see in your editor (if you are using Gutenberg this is the Photonic block in Gutenberg) will help you with this.
Thanks for the quick reply! My timing is unfortunate, but I have lots of practice rebuilding the galleries in Gutenberg since I did that last week using Picasa. Your user documentation is very helpful, and I’ll use that to work on the transfer to Google. Thanks again!
My timing is unfortunate, but I have lots of practice rebuilding the galleries in Gutenberg since I did that last week using Picasa
This is interesting – you have had to rebuild Photonic’s galleries for Gutenberg? That shouldn’t have been required … I tried to ensure that your galleries would look the same regardless of whether you were using Gutenberg, and I even added a shortcode migration script in case you needed to change your existing gallery shortcodes as used for Photonic to something else.
No, the Picasa galleries did work after I updated to Gutenberg and followed your transition steps.
I thought it would be better to rebuild them so the underlying code would be updated in case of potential future conflicts. If I had known Picasa was due to be deprecated so soon (the next week), I would have done the transition to Google Photos then, but I liked Picasa because it handles video. At least I know how to fix the issue.
I forgot to mark this as resolved. Thanks again for your help!
