Picasa API Deprecated
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Some time on 16th or 17th of January 2019 Google deprecated the Picasa API, resulting in multiple WP plugins breaking.
Some history:
- Google announced in Feb 2016 that it would kill Picasa, PicasaWeb, and the PicasaWeb API …
- … But it did not create / provide a public API for Google Photos for a long, long time.
- Finally in May 2018 Google introduced the API for Google Photos in a “developer preview” mode (i.e. some sort of a beta mode), and it kept the Picasa API alive.
- In July 2018 I added support for Google Photos to Photonic. I did make an observation in the Picasa documentation:
Also note that while Google hasn’t officially announced the date for phasing out the Picasa API, it will be phased out once the Google Photos API is more stable.
- In late September / early October 2018 the Google Photos API moved out from “developer preview” to “Production”.
- In January 2019 the PicasaWeb API was shut down.
Where does this leave you?
For starters, your pages displaying Picasa galleries will show this:
Failed to get data.
Error:
Start tag expected, ‘<‘ not foundData returned by Google:
The Picasa API is deprecated. See https://developers.google.com/picasa-web/ for more details and the migration guide.Given that Photonic has already built in the support for Google Photos you should be able to switch to it though. Note that while the switch is easy, it is not a simple “one-click-and-done” operation.
You have to do the following:
- First, reauthenticate for Google Photos. While some of these steps are already done as a part of your existing Picasa module, you have to specifically enable the id for Google Photos and then reauthenticate.
- Then, rebuild each of your galleries one by one using Google Photos. Hopefully the “Add / Edit Photonic Gallery” button that you see in your editor (if you are using Gutenberg this is the Photonic block) will help you with this.
As always, please feel free to open a new support ticket if you run into issues.
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