Synchronize your public iCloud photostreams to your WordPress installation. Import images, create gallery posts, and more.
Lets say, for the sake of argument that you have something like an iPhone. And you use it to take pictures. You sure wish there was an easy way to be able to set up a WordPress blog as a photoblog automatically. Now you can. The Photo Stream iCloud feature is just for this kind of task. You can sync to your iPhoto app, you can share to your friends, and even your TV. Now with this plugin you can have your WordPress blog automatically discover new photos shared from your iOS device and import them.
Just set up a Photo Stream. Configure it so that it has a “Public Web Site”. And this plugin will take care of the rest for you.
Warning: This section is pretty hardcore
iCloud publishes a JSON endpoint for its Photo Streams. This endpoint has a list of photos (but not urls for the photos) and data about them (like what group they belong to, who posted them, etc.) That endpoint gives you enough information to make an HTTP POST request to another URL at which you can find enough information to build the image fetch URLS. The data is only good for a limited amount of time (the urls that you build with this expire) and so it is necessary that you build this fresh when you’re going to use it. This is also why you can’t just import a list of photo urls and call it a day. Finally you can make a final HTTP request per image to get the data.
Essentially this plugin just does what your web browser would do if you visited the public photostream link.
I have not looked further into how likes, and additional comments on photos are stored. The data must be in there.
For theme developers there’s not much to know. You can specify any cats, or tags, you desire for a photostream. You can also specify custom post types. So you have a lot of flexibility. Finally, if the PHP Exif extension is installed and active ( http://www.php.net/exif ), then the plugin stores all EXIF metadata that if finds as postmeta data for the image attachment itself. For example:
It might be that your server has running out of memory. You can try increasing the available php memory to your server.
This plugin might help https://wordpress.org/plugins/memory-bump.
Photostream will not create the posts and media that have been imported already but will try to fetch the media that is not available in the database. However feel free to let it run in another tab while you browser the internet in diffrent browser window. You can see see the progress percentage in the tab.
Photostream relies on the WordPress Cron to update the media and galleries with new content that you have posted to your iCloud stream.
This means that if your website doesn’t recieve much traffic your new content will not be imported as frequently. Since traffic to your site is what triggers the WordPress cron to do work.
You can always trigger a content refresh by clicking on the import link.
This plugin uses uses WordPress built in work scheduling functionality to get its work done. It should try to do work every 15 minutes or so, but there are a couple of caveats. WordPress only does this work when people are visiting your site, and so if you’re not getting a lot of “foot traffic” then it may take some time for the plugin to do its magic. Most times publicly indexed (by search engines like google) sites should manage to stay more or less up to date with the work that they need to do unless the traffic on the photostream is very heavy.
In cases where you don’t want to wait for traffic, or your photostreams are very busy and you want instant updates you can take the advice of the following article to help make WordPress’ scheduled work feature more… on schedule…
Lets say that your photostream url is https://www.icloud.com/photostream/#nnnnnnnnnnnnn. You can put in “https://www.icloud.com/photostream/#nnnnnnnnnnnnn” or “nnnnnnnnnnnnn”. The plugin will validate what you put in as best as possible and try to figure out what you mean (and verify it by trying to fetch the stream from icloud.com) for you.