Shared Albums for Google Photos (by JanZeman)

A WordPress plugin that displays publicly shared Google Photos albums with a modern, responsive Swiper-based gallery viewer.

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📖 Full Documentation

→ See readme.txt for complete documentation, features, usage examples, and FAQs.

The readme.txt file contains the official WordPress.org plugin documentation with:

• Complete feature list
• Detailed usage instructions and shortcode parameters
• Installation guide
• FAQ section
• Changelog

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Quick Start

Installation

From WordPress.org (Recommended):

1. Go to Plugins > Add New in WordPress admin
2. Search for "Shared Albums for Google Photos (by JanZeman)"
3. Click Install Now and then Activate

Manual Installation:

1. Download the latest release
2. Upload to /wp-content/plugins/janzeman-shared-albums-for-google-photos/
3. Activate through WordPress admin

From GitHub (Development):

cd wp-content/plugins/
git clone https://github.com/JanZeman/shared-albums-for-google-photos.git

Basic Usage

[jzsa-album link="https://photos.google.com/share/YOUR_ALBUM_ID"]

For all shortcode parameters and advanced usage, see readme.txt.

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Key Features

• Multiple display modes - thumbnail gallery mode (default, with optional gallery-rows paging/scrolling), single-photo slider, or carousel (multi-photo preview that opens single-photo fullscreen)
• Touch gestures, zoom support, keyboard navigation
• Fullscreen image-fit modes with fit as the default (no crop, scales to fill one axis)
• Progressive image loading with lazy loading
• Responsive design (mobile, tablet, desktop)
• Customizable via shortcode parameters
• Shortcode Playground on the Settings page for experimenting with [jzsa-album] shortcodes and live previews
• Modern Swiper 11 gallery with fullscreen mode (bundled locally, no CDN dependencies)
• WordPress coding standards compliant

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⚠️ Important Limitation: Google Photos Description Truncation

Google Photos limits photo descriptions to 100 characters. Any description longer than this will be automatically truncated by Google Photos itself, not by this plugin.

What This Means

• If your photos have long descriptions (captions) in Google Photos
• Only the first 100 characters will be available when using the {description} placeholder
• This is a Google Photos limitation, not a plugin limitation
• There is no way to retrieve longer descriptions from public shared albums

Recommended Workaround

If you need to display descriptions longer than 100 characters, you have two options:

1. Edit your shortcode to include the full description text directly (bypassing Google Photos):

   [jzsa-album link="..." info-bottom="{date} | Full description text here can be as long as you want"]
   

2. Use info-wrap="true" to allow the truncated 100-character description to wrap to multiple lines:

   [jzsa-album link="..." info-bottom="{description} | {date}" info-wrap="true"]
   

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Development

For local test and release setup, including the WordPress.org SVN checkout used for production releases, see DEVELOPMENT.md.

Viewer parity rule

Lightbox and Fullscreen are two implementations of the same Viewer concept. When a behavior makes sense in both modes, mirror it between them unless there is a concrete technical or UX reason not to. This includes discoverability helpers such as first-time gesture hints.

File Structure

janzeman-shared-albums-for-google-photos/
├── assets/
│   ├── css/              # Stylesheets
│   └── js/               # JavaScript (Swiper initialization)
├── includes/
│   ├── class-data-provider.php    # Fetches Google Photos data
│   ├── class-orchestrator.php     # Main plugin orchestrator
│   ├── class-renderer.php         # HTML rendering
│   ├── class-admin-pages.php      # Admin guide and reference pages
│   └── class-community.php        # Community directory feature
├── LICENSE
├── README.md             # This file (GitHub overview)
├── readme.txt            # WordPress.org official documentation ⭐
└── janzeman-shared-albums-for-google-photos.php       # Main plugin file

Requirements

• WordPress 5.5 or higher
• PHP 7.0 or higher
• Public Google Photos album (shared via link)

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please:

1. Fork the repository
2. Create a feature branch
3. Submit a pull request

For bug reports and feature requests, use GitHub Issues.

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Support

• Documentation: readme.txt
• WordPress.org Forum: https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/janzeman-shared-albums-for-google-photos/
• GitHub Issues: https://github.com/JanZeman/shared-albums-for-google-photos/issues

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License

GPL v2 or later - see LICENSE file.

This plugin is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or in any way officially connected with Google LLC or Google Photos. Google Photos™ is a trademark of Google LLC.

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Credits

• Uses Swiper - MIT License
• Uses Plyr - MIT License
• Developed by Jan Zeman