How to Add to gallery?

You cannot do that because the WP options are only applicable to photos that are present locally in your media library.

That being said, which “essential” option is not available in Photonic’s Wizard? The Wizard is an order of magnitude more comprehensive than WP in terms of layout options.

I meant the settings for the plugin on the right of the screenshot. The plugin is called “Essential Gallery”

Could Photonic integrate with media/gallery so we can import through Photonic instead of just local media?

Or do you suggest any other alternative?

I’m basically trying to use google photos as a host for the photos that I need clients to proof (select which photos they like)
Same as this function: https://www.dynamicpress.eu/envato/adeline_main/proof_gallery/proofing-gallery/

A few things here: Photonic is not a plugin that is meant to download photos from an external source. It acts as a transparent layer to your photos on an external platform, e.g. Flickr, SmugMug, Google Photos etc.

This has 2 major implications with respect to your query:

1. It does not integrate with the media library in the traditional sense, since the media library can only work with photos that are locally hosted. Many of its features such as cropping etc. cannot work on remote photos.
2. The second reason this is important is because it means Photonic has to operate within scope of the APIs that the external platforms provide to it. In case of Google one of the aspects of the API is that you cannot select individual photos by id – they have to be picked either as albums or using a predefined (by Google) list of categories, or a date filter. There literally is no way to tell Google to give you even one photo just by id.

The other point over here is that Photonic’s selection is all in the back-end. A concept such as proofing is only applicable on the front-end, where you are going to be doing some sort of e-commerce integration with a shopping cart or a print lab. You will need to build some sort of elaborate custom integration for this – I am not aware of any plugin that does this, definitely not in the free plugin space.

Thank you for your in-depth reply.

It’s a shame that it’s looking unlikely to achieve what I’m after.
But just to clarify in hopes that it may still have a small chance of being achievable.

I’m not looking at incorporating a shopping cart type of proofing.
All I need is for customers to select the photos they like, output the list of filenames to a spreadsheet or .txt file so I can import that into lightroom.

This is for the wedding clients to pick which photos they’d like in the album.
So not looking to download the photos or crop images of any kind

What gives me hope is that when the photos are displayed on the page using photonics and I right-click and “save image as…”, the default name of the file is shown as the original filename.
So isn’t that enough for the plugin to be able to see which file names are selected?
Wouldn’t be a case of the plugin building a “selected” filter?

Thank you again for your help

I’m not looking at incorporating a shopping cart type of proofing.
All I need is for customers to select the photos they like, output the list of filenames to a spreadsheet or .txt file so I can import that into lightroom.

Conceptually there isn’t much of a difference between a “shopping cart” (or a print lab, as written in my previous post) and what you are describing here. Both require an ability for an end-user (or site visitor) to be able to select a photo and direct that somewhere, be it a shopping cart, or a print lab, or a file for LR integration. Basically you are looking for a workflow – Photonic is not meant for that.

So isn’t that enough for the plugin to be able to see which file names are selected?
Wouldn’t be a case of the plugin building a “selected” filter?

No – unfortunately that is not how Google or any other platform works.

A “file name” only makes sense to the person uploading a photo. You may have 15 albums locally, and each album might have photos named “1.jpg”, “2.jpg”, “3.jpg” etc. When you upload the photos to Google, Google doesn’t really care that you have 15 files called “1.jpg”, one in each local album. Consequently, it does not let you search by a file name.

Instead, Google creates its own ids for each file you have uploaded. That way it has an internal mechanism to keep track of all the data, and it avoids any confusion pertaining to user-specific file names. Note that Google lets you store one photo in multiple albums, so regardless of your local folder structure, one Google album can store multiple files that are called “1.jpg” in your local file system.

What you are really after, is an integration between Google and LR (two third-party, proprietary platforms), all managed through WP. Solutions for this might exist, but I am sure they will come with a probably hefty price tag, since I know from first-hand experience how complex it is to build an integration with Google.

Thank you

Although I think you still missed one part of my explanation ??

I don’t want it to integrate with lightroom. As I mentioned above, I just want it to output filenames to a text file

When you talk about google not caring about how many 1.jpg files there are in my account is besides the point I think. In my case, there will only be unique filenames in each folder (client folder) no 2 are the same.
That’s why I really think a “local” filter within the plugin somehow to just filter which ones are selected and extract the file names (which are already there on the website as titles) would suffice. This functionality is already available in photoproofing plugins but they don’t integrate google platforms unfortunately

I would also like to point out this plugin which uses Google Drive to integrate with WP.
https://www.wpcloudplugins.com/plugins/use-your-drive-wordpress-plugin-for-google-drive/
It has the same functionality as your plugin but not for google drive, however, I’m able to select individual photos and download all the selected files as zip….
I can’t see why that is possible with google drive but not google photos

Perhaps your first-hand experience is dated and google has changed it’s APIs?

In the end of the day, you’re the guru and I’m not a developer, I’m just having trouble seeing why it’s not possible

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I think you changed your post multiple times after you posted the first time, which is why I didn’t get notified about your updates. WP only notifies me when you post a reply, not if you update the reply.

When you talk about google not caring about how many 1.jpg files there are in my account is besides the point I think. In my case, there will only be unique filenames in each folder (client folder) no 2 are the same.
That’s why I really think a “local” filter within the plugin somehow to just filter which ones are selected and extract the file names (which are already there on the website as titles) would suffice.

I understand that you as a user might keep unique file names which are same as the title, but Google Photos has several million users, and there are several of them who do not. That is why Google’s Photos APIs don’t provide this hook.

Now, let’s say I start building something in the plugin that lets me search by file name. Since Google doesn’t give me a native way, the only way for me to do this is to fetch every photo first, then go through each photo and check for the file name. This might sound easy, but it isn’t so. When you pull photos using its API, Google limits it to 100 results at a time. So, if you have 5000 photos, to get all of them the plugin will have to make 50 API calls. A Google API call takes around 1 second to execute, which means that your page will be stuck for around one minute before all photos are fetched.

I also think that you are confusing the intent of the plugin – what you are describing is a front-end selection action. As I mentioned in my second post:

The other point over here is that Photonic’s selection is all in the back-end. A concept such as proofing is only applicable on the front-end, where you are going to be doing some sort of e-commerce integration with a shopping cart or a print lab. You will need to build some sort of elaborate custom integration for this – I am not aware of any plugin that does this, definitely not in the free plugin space.

Yes, I know you are not doing e-commerce or a print lab integration. But that doesn’t change the fact that front-end selection and proofing is beyond the realm of Photonic’s intended scope. Implementing such a capability requires me to build out features similar to shopping carts, just without the requirement to buy. Regardless of whether I build an ability to search by file name, building front-end selection capabilities are akin to building a new plugin.

I would also like to point out this plugin which uses Google Drive to integrate with WP.
https://www.wpcloudplugins.com/plugins/use-your-drive-wordpress-plugin-for-google-drive/
It has the same functionality as your plugin but not for google drive, however, I’m able to select individual photos and download all the selected files as zip….
I can’t see why that is possible with google drive but not google photos

Google Drive and Google Photos are very, very different products and they don’t have the same API. Google Drive deals with files and file metadata (e.g. file name, file size, extension, file type etc.). Google Photos deals with photos and photo metadata (image title, EXIF information, dimensions of the photo, MIME type etc.). The Drive API has some limited capabilities for image metadata – you can get information such as dimensions or EXIF, but you cannot get information such as an image’s title, and you cannot do things like cropping an image on the display, or filtering by when a photo was taken (not when the file was created), or streaming a video (yes, these may not apply to you, but it does to a significant majority of Google Photos users). Drive merely acts as a file storage, nothing more, and definitely not a Photo platform. Conversely, the Photos API doesn’t let you search by file name, or download multiple files at the same time – those are features of the Drive API.

That is not to say that Google Drive cannot be used for Photos – you can, but you will be limited to the kind of folder structure and sharing that a regular file system folder gives you.

Perhaps your first-hand experience is dated and google has changed it’s APIs?

While that is a possibility, in this case it most definitely isn’t so :-). If you survey across Photonic’s user base, most people use the plugin for Google Photos, followed by SmugMug and Flickr. Incidentally Google Photos and Instagram have the worst and underpowered APIs of the lot, so I keep scanning the API for additions and changes every couple of weeks. In fact, since I was one of the early adopters of the API, there are quite a few bug reports and feature requests that I logged against the product, which resulted in new features being developed (e.g. video handling, MIME type support expansion etc.).

As I mentioned above, I just want it to output filenames to a text file

Regardless of the distinction between Drive and Photos, if this is your fundamental requirement, that wouldn’t be met by Photonic, since it doesn’t allow you to output filenames (or even photo ids) to a text file, and unless I offer the ability to do proofing, such a feature will not be in place.