Google photos not showing

I can’t help without an active URL. However, if you search through this forum or read the plugin FAQs, you will see that the most common issue for Google Photos is the use of a caching plugin. If you have a caching plugin, you will either have to disable it for pages with Google Photos, or use the JavaScript load mode of Photonic.

I read through the support and I turned off my caching plugin to no avail.
Here’s a live URL https://crdg.hawaii.edu/summerprograms/2022/06/24/week-03-afternoon-programs/
that has both the Flickr gallery & Google photos inserted into the page but only the Flickr images are showing up.

At least as of now, I am not seeing an issue with your Google Photos galleries. All photos on your site seem to be showing up fine. For each gallery I see 2 sets of photos – the top one with Flickr and the bottom one with Google.

It magically started working so I removed the Flickr galleries and now the same issues are happening. The Google photos are not appearing so I added the Flickr galleries back. I’m really hoping we can figure this out because this plugin really delivers a solid service. Thanks. Below are two links to the affected pages.

https://crdg.hawaii.edu/summerprograms/2022/06/24/week-03-morning-programs/

https://crdg.hawaii.edu/summerprograms/2022/06/24/week-03-afternoon-programs/

You seem to be exceeding your request quota. Your site’s errors say:

Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 429 (Too Many Requests)

I have very rarely seen users hit their daily limit (maybe once or twice so far). The limits are set at 2 levels: 10000 API calls, and 75000 base URL calls. Generally, 1 gallery = 1 API call. Each time your page reloads, it is a new call. Since Google does not support caching its results, if you have 10 galleries on a page and that page is loaded 100 times a day, you will get to 1000 API calls.

Now, if each gallery has 50 photos, there are two potential “base URL” calls involved for each, or 100 in total. The first is when the thumbnail is shown. The second is incurred only if someone clicks on the thumbnail to see the lightbox, or gets to the photo while clicking on the arrows in the lightbox. So, for each page load, you may expect a maximum of 50 photos x 10 galleries x 2 calls = 1000 base URL calls. If that page is loaded 75 times and each visitor repeats the pattern, you will hit your quota. Hitting either the API quota or the base URL quota on a given day will result in the error. You might need to figure out your usage pattern.

I also noticed that you seem to be using Jetpack’s image CDN, which is further storing a copy of Flickr’s photos on WP’s own servers. This is counterintuitive, since Flickr’s CDNs are well-optimized themselves, and you are reducing efficiency by leaving the Jetpack CDN on. You might want to turn that off.

Thank you so much for your detailed explanation. Flickr doesn’t seem to have the same issue as the Google photos. Is it that Flickr is allowing more requests than Google?

Flickr’s API rate limit is 3600 per hour, which translates to 86400 a day. This is higher than Google. However, what helps with Flickr’s case is that there is just one type of an API call. Once the call returns the markup to you, you don’t make additional calls to fetch photos. So, if you are displaying an album/photoset, Photonic needs to ping Flickr at the most twice – once for the photos in the album, and once more if you opt to show the album thumbnail in the header. All other data is static.

By contrast, Google really racks up the API calls.

Note that this is all dependent on the platforms themselves. Photonic by itself makes the minimum number of calls that can be made. So Photonic calls Google just once for a gallery. It is just that when your browser is rendering the photos, Google counts them as separate calls.

Wow! Thank you so much for your time and knowledge. Great plugin! I highly recommend it.