Image and video gallery from Google Drive

May 26, 2024

Image and video gallery from Google Drive Plugin

A WordPress gallery using Google Drive as file storage

Image and video gallery from Google Drive is a plugin for WordPress that connects your site to your Google Drive. With this plugin, you can select any folder in your Drive or a Shared drive and the plugin will convert it into a gallery, displaying any photos or videos in a page or a post on your website. Any folders and their subfolders will also be displayed in the gallery as nested galleries.

All the data is sourced from Google Drive with nothing but the plugin configuration being a part of your website. This enables your site to load faster as the images are loaded from Google and not from your hosting provider. It may also save you costs for your site hosting, as the big files of the gallery are not stored as part of your site. On top of that, if you ever decide to move or reinstall your site, simply install this plugin again on the new site and your old galleries will still be there and working.

Having the photos in Google Drive also gives you a familiar and easy-to-navigate UI for gallery management. You can give individual people or groups granular permissions to the Drive folder, making them able to add photos to a particular gallery without giving them full access to your site. They will then be able to manage the content of the gallery through Google Drive, without having to learn how to work with WordPress. You can also manage all content in your organization with Shared drives owned by your organization’s Google Workspace (formerly known as G Suite).

Using this plugin is very straightforward. Once the plugin is installed and configured, you can add a Google Drive gallery to any page or post. If you are using WordPress 5 or newer with the block editor (i. e. Gutenberg), there is a block that you can add that will allow you to choose a folder with a graphical user interface. It also makes it possible to configure each individual gallery very easily, should you want to do that. If you are using an older WordPress version or are still using the classic editor, there is a shortcode you can use instead of the block.

If you want to see how to install, configure and use the plugin, visit our documentation. To see the plugin in action, head on to the demo page.

Features

  • Display any Google Drive folder as a gallery
  • Subfolders are automatically displayed as nested galleries – no need to configure them
  • You can restrict the plugin to a certain folder (we call it the “root” folder), making sure that no data outside this root folder will ever be displayed on your site
  • Insert a gallery with a shortcode or with a click of a button
  • Provides a Gutenberg block, making sure that your galleries will work even in WordPress 5
  • Also works with Shared drives (formerly known as Team drives)
  • Supports videos as well

Minimal requirements

  • WordPress 4.9.6 or higher
  • PHP 5.6 or higher

GitHub

All the sources for the plugin and the build process are detailed in our Github repo.

Installation

  1. Download and install the plugin from the WordPress plugin directory or from GitHub
  2. Create a Google app and configure the plugin
  3. Select a root directory for the plugin to use
  4. Add a gallery

Screenshots

  1. <p>A simple gallery</p>

    A simple gallery

  2. <p>A gallery with subfolders</p>

    A gallery with subfolders

  3. <p>Subfolder view</p>

    Subfolder view

  4. <p>An open image</p>

    An open image

  5. <p>Basic options</p>

    Basic options

  6. <p>Advanced options</p>

    Advanced options

FAQ

How to configure this plugin?

See our documentation.

How do I create a Google app?

We have a special page in our documentation just about that.

What are the other options for this plugin?

For more info about all the options see the documentation page about advanced options.

How do I create a shortcode?

To show a Google Drive gallery add the shortcode [sgdg path="Folder name"] to the page where “Folder name” is a folder in the root directory of the plugin.
It is also possible to use subdirectories with the shortcode [sgdg path="Folder name/subfolder/subsubfolder"].
If no path is provided, then the root directory itself is used.

Why isn’t my video shown?

The plugin only shows videos that can be played by the browser. Unfortunately, at the moment, different browsers support different video formats. If you want the best support, we recommend using MP4. Detailed information about which formats are supported by each browser can be found on Wikipedia.

The plugin loses authorization every 7 days

Unfortunately, this is a limitation of Google apps in testing mode, see Google’s documentation. To circumvent this, set your app as either “Internal” or “In Production”.

I’m getting an unknown error

Please enable WordPress debugging to see more information and open a support ticket if relevant.

I’m getting the error `refresh token must be passed in or set as part of setAccessToken`

This error happens for a small fraction of Google apps for an unknown reason. Please delete and recreate the application in the Google developer console.

Changelog

2.13.13

  • Fixed an issue with gallery expiring after an hour. API access needs to be revoked and re-granted to fix the issue.

2.13.12

  • Fixed an error with incorrect script MIME types, breaking the plugin on sites with strict checking

2.13.11

  • Fixed an issue with paths containing shortcuts
  • Fixed collisions with other plugins dues to incomplete dependency scoping

2.13.10

  • Fixed a race condition that sometimes caused path verification checks to not be run
  • Fixed an issue with shortcode localization not being loaded due to unspecified WordPress action order

2.13.9

  • Fixed ordering images by time
  • Fixed an error when a video doesn’t have proper permissions
  • Fixed error messages not being HTML escaped

2.13.8

  • Fixed support for PHP 5

2.13.7

  • Fixed big galleries triggering Google API batch request size limit
  • Fixed toggle labels in block settings override

2.13.6

  • Fixed an error when selecting plugin root directory and navigating to the Drive list

2.13.5

  • Fixed a PHP 5 compatibility regression

2.13.4

  • Improved error reporting, including a stack trace when in debug mode

2.13.3

  • Fixed an issue with galleries sometimes erroneously being reported as empty when images were ordered by time

2.13.2

  • Fixed an issue with multiple galleries on the same page

2.13.1

  • Fixed an error on incomplete Google API response
  • Fixed a PHP warning on images without a timestamp
  • Optimized JS code bundling and minimization
  • Fixed using deprecated JavaScript functionality
  • Fixed an issue with WordPress script localization

2.13.0

  • Fixed galleries with leading or trailing spaces in names
  • Added support for private videos and videos over 25MB
  • Hidden videos with missing thumbnail

2.12.1

  • Dropped support for Internet Explorer 8
  • Fixed an issue where the plugin would break in rare cases of corrupted video files

2.12.0

  • Officially added support for PHP 8.1 and WordPress 5.9
  • Fixed a bug where pages would get added to the gallery infinitely
  • Printing all errors when WordPress is set to debug

2.11.3

  • Fixed an issue breaking gallery displaying in 2.11.2

2.11.2

  • Fixed a minor collision with some other plugins
  • PHP 8.1 compatibility
  • Better error handling when the root path contains a Shared Drive that no longer exists

2.11.1

  • Fixed the root directory selector, especially in cases when the root dir is invalid

2.11.0

  • New icon and assets

2.10.4

  • Bundling dependencies in a more robust way
  • Erased Google Drive logo from all wordpress.org assets. All new assets will be coming in a following version

2.10.3

  • Fixed a possible incompatibility with some other plugins which use the Google API

2.10.2

  • Fixed galleries being incorrectly reported as empty

2.10.1

  • PHP 8 and WordPress 5.6 support
  • Better error handling

2.10.0

  • Substantially reduced occurrence of rate limit errors
  • Better error handling
  • Moved the plugin block under the “media” category

2.9.1

  • Fixed an issue where additional pages may not get loaded in an edge case
  • Upgraded a dependency to prevent a possible security issue

2.9.0

  • Added support for Google Drive shortcuts to folders (image/video shortcuts coming in a future version)
  • Improved error handling in the plugin shortcode & block
  • Improved handling of corrupted videos

2.8.1

  • Fixed missing space in gallery breadcrumbs
  • Fixed turning off JS events, breaking e.g. sticky headers
  • Fixed missing vendor files, causing errors for some users

2.8.0

  • Partially fixed videos: Videos which have permissions set to “Anyone on the internet with this link can view” will now work again correctly. Fix for private videos coming in a later version

2.7.9

  • Fixed fatal error for users without the mbstring PHP extension

2.7.8

  • Fixed fatal error for users without the intl and idn PHP extensions

2.7.7

  • Re-release of the changes from version 2.7.5
  • Fixed handling of HTTP request exceptions
  • Tested on WordPress 5.4

2.7.6

  • Rollback of version 2.7.5, identical to version 2.7.4

2.7.5

  • Fixed handling of HTTP request exceptions

2.7.4

  • Fixed a bug in ordering options causing some issues primarily when ordering by name

2.7.3

  • Reverted a dependency update causing issues and PHP version incompatibility

2.7.2

  • Checking JS with TypeScript
  • JS and CSS is now minified in the plugin, original sources available in the repository
  • Fixed issue with TinyMCE plugin table overflowing the thickbox
  • Handling Google errors in root selection when changing user account
  • Handling Google errors in gallery enqueueing
  • Refactored all JS code
  • Fixed issue with & in folder name

2.7.1

  • Fixed a bug causing galleries not to load
  • Slightly tweaked the grid layout

2.7.0

  • Added video support
  • Documented all of the source code

2.6.0

  • Incorporated updates to Google Drive and its API, namely the rebranding of Team Drives as Shared drives
  • Added support for image captions sourced from the “description” field in Google Drive
  • Added more quality control with more still to follow

2.5.0

  • Added support for pagination of gallery items with configurable page size and optional (enabled by default) autoloading
  • Added option to hide a part (a prefix to be more precise) of folder names. This is useful when folders are ordered by name to define own custom ordering
  • Fixed an issue with incorrect Authorised JavaScript origin for websites located in a subdirectory
  • Added more checks to plugin options to ensure they can’t break it
  • Enabled support for caching plugins

2.4.0

  • Added the option to override some settings for individual galleries using shortcode attributes or the Gutenberg block
  • Fixed loading indicator styling inconsistency

2.3.5

  • Fixed lightbox arrow styling on some templates
  • Better error reporting for Root selection, TinyMCE and Gutenberg plugins
  • Better loading animation
  • Clickable breadcrumbs in Root selection, TinyMCE and Gutenberg plugins

2.3.4

  • Updated basic settings to reflect changes to the Google developer console

2.3.3

  • Fixed error with multiple blocks not working

2.3.2

  • Image ordering by time now uses EXIF DateTime
  • Partially fixed issue with URL being overridden when not terminated by a slash
  • Fixed imprecise directory item counts
  • Fixed issue with other plugins overriding styles

2.3.1

2.3.0

  • Fixed potential collision with global composer
  • Directory item counts with icons instead of text
  • Added more error messages
  • Fixed infinite spinner on empty gallery
  • Not displaying empty subgalleries

2.2.3

  • Fixed more problems with the justified layout
  • Open images now have a unique and permanent address so a link to a particular image can be copied and sent

2.2.2

  • Fixed multiple galleries in one page
  • Fixed some aspect ratios getting squished
  • Not displaying breadcrumbs when there is nowhere to navigate

2.2.1

  • Fixed an issue with images not being displayed

2.2.0

  • Galleries loading with AJAX
  • Dark theme

2.1.0

  • Using Flickr-style justified layout

2.0.2

  • Performance optimisations for subdirectories

2.0.1

  • Fixed missing ordering options

2.0.0

  • Moved settings to 2 top-level pages
  • Changed the Google API redirect URI
  • Handling unauthorized plugin in Block & Shortcode

1.2.1

  • Fixed error with Gutenberg block overwriting its configuration

1.2.0

  • Added proper support for dynamic columns
  • Added a Gutenberg block

1.1.0

  • Added the option to order images and directories (separately) – by time or name, ascending or descending

1.0.1

  • Added graphical editor for TinyMCE

1.0.0

  • The first version
  • Required WordPress 4.9.6 and higher
  • Required PHP 5.6 and higher

Details

  • Version: 2.13.13
  • Active installations: 4,000
  • WordPress Version: 4.9.6
  • Tested up to: 6.5.5
  • PHP Version: 5.6

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