Google Album Filters?

  • Resolved wattse

    (@wattse)


    3 years, 3 months ago

    Greetings!

    I have a Google photostream with well over 100 albums. I would like to present the albums in the gallery page, and either include or exclude by perhaps a word in the title, or (ideally) the presence of a favorited picture inside the album. I’m guessing the Google API doesn’t allow the latter.

    Basically, I’m planning on creating a small subset of curated albums and display those, without needing to update the shortlink-equivalent block on the page every time I create a new curated album.

    For example, only display album titles with the word “Public” in them, or similar.

    I’m running WordPress version 5.8, with the Omega theme. I have the Google API interactions set up and behaving – I get the entire album list, clicking through pops up a nice lightbox to scroll through. So I’m about 90% there…

    Thanks for such a great plugin!

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Plugin Author Sayontan Sinha

    (@sayontan)

    Unfortunately, Google’s API does not support word-based filtering of albums. In fact, for a search engine, Google’s API for photos is practically useless when it comes to searching.

    The only type of search that is allowed is a content-based search of the photos themselves (see the “Content Filters” section of the documentation).

    Thread Starter wattse

    (@wattse)

    Perhaps a filter could be implemented in the plugin?

    Plugin Author Sayontan Sinha

    (@sayontan)

    This has been asked quite a few times in the past, and my response has always been the same: doing this via the plugin is inadvisable. Your search strings might be on latter pages of the album list (and may not be present on the first page at all). Note that Google never returns more than 50 results in a page. Moreover, while you are asking for a name-based search, someone else might ask for a date-based search – all of these result in inefficient implementations, which slow down the plugin.

    Think of it this way: you buy a product to replace something you have at home, but after opening it and trying to install it, you figure that it is not compatible with your overall setup. So, you send it back and order a different model, only to find the same thing. So, you continue this process until you finally find a match. This ends up in a fair bit of frustration, and is very time-consuming. This is akin to a third-party plugin filtering results after they are returned.

    Instead, wouldn’t it help if the product manufacturer had some sort of a questionnaire that asked some questions about your setup upfront and let you know directly which of their products is a match? This is akin to the service provider implementing a change in their API at source.

    Thread Starter wattse

    (@wattse)

    Heh, I should have been able to figure out that one.

    I do have another workaround, which is that I’ll create an extra Google (Photos) account and share only the albums I wish visible to that account, and have that account be the one that Photonic pulls from.

    Plugin Author Sayontan Sinha

    (@sayontan)

    I do have another workaround, which is that I’ll create an extra Google (Photos) account and share only the albums I wish visible to that account, and have that account be the one that Photonic pulls from.

    That’s a pretty neat way to resolve this!

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • The topic ‘Google Album Filters?’ is closed to new replies.

Tags