Lots of Google Code

Once a useful plugin that was free and open source and worked without upgrade advertisements and tiers of features. Back then WordPress also worked more simply, the sharks had not yet been jumped.

It’s been through at least two monetizing owners, trying to turn it into something it originally wasn’t meant to be.

The current owners are making it look very nice and smooth, but one needs to allow Google scripts to fully use it now, sadly. If that means I am the product, why would I pay for upgrades and also provide Google with free data?

My blocker showed 10 Google-things were blocked while I was trying to insert a gallery into a post, and the Gallery selector never did appear, so obviously there is tracking built-in to let Google know what photos one is adding and probably to upload them and add them to the Google worldwide slurp.

I’m not a fan of that kind of thing, I don’t need to trade “exposure” for giving Google free content which then competes with my own site.

At this point, pasting in the insert code, [nggallery id=xxx] where xxx is the Gallery number, still works.

If I was starting over from scratch, which WordPress and Gutenburg are increasingly tempting me to do, I would use another plugin.

I get that people need to get paid, but I’m not so sure that they need to get paid for pasting Google code into their app.

EDIT: With the latest version (3.24) NGG now apparently doesn’t work on Mozilla based browsers. It uploaded 5 photos to what was supposed to be one gallery, but made 5 identically named galleries, one for each photo. I got all the photos rounded up into one of the galleries after deleting the other 4 and now the Insert Gallery button doesn’t work. To use this I need to go find the insert code from another post. Of course they do not supply those in the app somewhere since their app is infallible.

Apparently Google so urgently needs to know exactly when and where I post my photos on my own hosting (that Google ignores the robots.txt on as they slurp my work anyway and provide thumbnails for people who steal it for their own sites), so Immagely are using some Chrome-only feature to make the button work. Fortunately there are other products.

Both NGG and WordPress have jumped the shark at this point. Been using both for years, WP since it first came out in 2004. This post that I can’t do right now is going to be the first post on some other platform.

• This topic was modified 3 years, 6 months ago by seedy.
• This topic was modified 3 years, 6 months ago by seedy.
• This topic was modified 2 years, 8 months ago by seedy.
• This topic was modified 2 years, 8 months ago by seedy.