Photonic: FILTERing Google Albums by DATE

Q1. How exactly is filtering by DATE configured by users?

This way. If you use the Photonic gallery builder (a.k.a. the “Add / Edit Photonic Gallery” button in the classic editor, or the Photonic block in Gutenberg), there are fields there that let you put in the date. If you hover over the fields they tell you what you can put in, but the documentation that I have linked is comprehensive.

Q2. Is the “Date” in question . .
the Album (set-up) Date?
the Image Creation Date?
the Image Upload date?
The earliest/oldest date of images in a particular album?

It has nothing to do with the album’s setup date. Dates pertaining to an album are of no consequence. As per Google’s documentation the date filter fetches images by creation date.

Many thanks for the speedy response.

I had been hoping that I could display selected Albums by their creation date but I now understand Filtering by Dates can only be applied to Images.

However, I see an alternative option. Since my Albums all contain images of similar dates, I can use the option to display Multiple Albums and be selective about the particular Albums I chose to display.

Thanks again and good luck with your work.

M.

Oh Oh!
Selecting specific Albums is offered but unfortunately, the Titles of the Albums are not displayed, making it very difficult to be sure of selecting the correct ones.

M.

There is an option to search. Does that not work?

The underlying images (about events in 2017 & later uploaded by many volunteers) may
– have been uploaded to Google in 2018
– have been processed and output as new images in a later year
– contain images of 2017 events but with bad dates due to mis-configued cameras)
So date of image is actually unreliable
(I realise my initial query was about selecting dates; I would have compromised)

I’ve got around this by ensuring the albums contain a Title beginning “2017 . . . ” regardless of Image metadata or date uploaded

I’d like to manually select albums with names starting with (or even containing) “2017” but search box returns a blank on “2017”.

M.

How many albums do you have? More than 50, or less? If you have more than 50, can you ensure that you first get a listing of all your albums, by clicking on the “More” button at the bottom? Does searching for “2017” give you nothing even after doing this? Basically Google doesn’t allow any sort of search for albums, so the only way to do a search is outside Google, by first fetching all albums, then looking at their names.

If you are still getting blank results when you have listed all albums, there is a little more tedious workaround. This works particularly if you are generating a shortcode to put into your page.

Aha!

I have 200+ Albums.

I can see now that
1. the Search box is ‘looking’ at the Album set that’s currently displayed
2. by loading more, the search term is applied to a greater population of Albums.

Its really fast – offering instant displays of those Albums whose Titles contain the search term. This is an impressive feature. It means (for me) that by naming my Google Albums consistently and including key words (which I’ve already done), I can filter different selections of Albums for display on different pages.

Thank you so much for your responsiveness and advice.

M.