The only remaining plugin for Google Photos! But limited settings and buggy…

After Google Photos removed the API in 2025, this plugin is, to my knowledge, the only one still supporting it via web scraping (if Google doesn’t care about the unnecessary extra traffic, why should we, right?). The scraping works well enough and is reasonably fast, but the gallery implementation is extremely barebones and lacks 95% of features that are standard for any modern media gallery (pages, layout customization, metadata etc.). In addition, videos within a Google Photos album are completely ignored – I had to manually add video parsing functionality to the GooglePhotos.php (Embedpress/Providers) and my php knowledge is that of a caveman, so it’s beyond me why that’s not implemented. Sure, it costs Google even more unnecessary traffic (oh no)…

And since some recent update within the last few months, the standard Gutenberg editor integration was broken, at least for Google Photos (not sure if it’s due to a plugin update or WordPress 7.0 update). Creating an Embedpress block with the album URL works normally, it shows a preview and lets you edit the block parameters. Saving also works and the gallery shows up on the page/post. However, if you go back into the editor, the Embedpress block data can’t be accessed and you’re shown the empty block mask asking you for the URL (see screenshot: i.imgur.com/8Lc1GO0.png) – so you have to re-setup the Embedpress block every time you edit the page/post. A current workaround is to use shortcodes with the album URL and the undocumented “mode” parameter for the Google Photos gallery (e.g. mode=’gallery-justify’). If only there was some kind of forum or Github page to discuss these issues publicly instead of using the review section, but alas…

• This topic was modified 1 month, 4 weeks ago by novgorod.