Gallery for Google Photos – share your albums right on your site

Bring your Google Photos albums to your website – import photos and videos into beautiful, responsive galleries your visitors can search, filter, and view in a lightbox.

Demos | Documentation

Why Gallery for Google Photos?

This plugin offers a seamless way to integrate beautiful Google Photos galleries directly into your WordPress website. Import photos and videos with the official Google Photos Picker – your media is saved to your own WordPress Media Library, and your Google credentials stay on your own server, never sent to us.

Whether you’re a photographer, blogger, or business owner, you get customizable layouts (grid, masonry, carousel, stories), a full-featured lightbox, live search with voice input, visual filter presets, and pagination – all responsive and theme-friendly. Say goodbye to complex embed codes and manual updates.

Free Features

Import & Connection

• Official Google Photos Picker: Import photos and videos directly from Google Photos; imported media is saved to your WordPress Media Library.
• Self-Hosted OAuth: Your own Google credentials stay on your server and are never sent to us.
• Authorization Sidebar: Field validation, loading state, and connect/disconnect controls.
• Media Type Filter: Show all media, photos only, or videos only.

Layouts

• Grid Layout: Fully responsive photo grid.
• Masonry Layout: Pinterest-style layout where each image keeps its own ratio.
• Carousel / Slider: Autoplay, loop, navigation arrows, and pagination dots.
• Memories / Stories Layout: Google Photos-style round story bubbles.
• Responsive Columns: Separate column counts for desktop, tablet, and mobile, with adjustable column and row gaps.
• Aspect Ratio & Borders: Ratio control (16:9, 4:3, 1:1, 3:4, 9:16) plus image border width, style, color, and radius.

Captions, Hover & Filters

• Captions: From image title or date – below the image or as a hover overlay, with typography and color controls.
• Hover Effects: Zoom, overlay, caption slide-in, and a meta overlay showing each photo’s date and dimensions.
• Visual Filter Presets: Grayscale, Sepia, Vintage, Warm, and Cool, with an optional reveal-original-on-hover transition.
• Focal Point Crop: Set one crop focus for all images with live preview, or fine-tune individual photos so faces are never cut off.
• Ken Burns Motion: Slow, continuous zoom/pan with adjustable speed – great for hero backgrounds and kiosks.

Search & Filtering

• Live Search Bar: Always-visible or expandable – filter the gallery by photo title or date as visitors type.
• Voice Search: Search by speaking, using the browser’s built-in speech recognition.
• Autocomplete & Highlighting: Matching titles and dates drop down as visitors type, with matched text highlighted.
• Live Result Count & Year Chips: A “3 of 125 photos” indicator plus one-click year filter chips – every search feature can be toggled individually.

Lightbox

• Fancybox Lightbox: Photo and video playback with captions, keyboard navigation, slideshow autoplay, and a thumbnails bar.
• Share & Download: Optional download button plus Facebook, X, Pinterest, and copy-link share buttons in the toolbar.
• Deep-Link to a Photo: The open photo is reflected in the URL (?photo=N) so a shared link reopens it.
• Video Options: Controls, autoplay, muted, loop, and fit-to-window.

Pagination, Performance & Usability

• Pagination Choices: Show all, Load More, or numbered pagination with configurable items per page and a customizable Load More button.
• Performance & SEO: Lazy loading with blur placeholders, responsive srcset, Schema.org ImageObject markup, and per-image alt text editing.
• Usability: Drag-to-reorder photos, frontend sort dropdown (Newest/Oldest/Random), photo count badge, preview limit with “View all”, JSON import/export of gallery settings, shortcode support ([google_photos id=..]), and a modern React admin dashboard.

Pro Version

Upgrade to Pro to unlock advanced layouts, automation, and client-delivery tools:

• Justified / Mosaic Layout: Images fill every row edge-to-edge with varying widths.
• Timeline Layout: Group photos by day, month, or year with sticky date headers – perfect for travel blogs and event recaps.
• Design Presets: Apply a complete look in one click (Clean Grid, Dark Portfolio, Polaroid, Magazine, and more) and save your own presets.
• Advanced Carousel & Hover: Slide effects, speed, slides-per-group, centered slides, grab cursor, pause-on-hover, free-mode, grayscale hover, hover icons, and gradient overlays.
• Premium Lightbox: Multiple lightbox skins, video autoplay, EXIF display (camera, lens, aperture, shutter speed, ISO), and per-image custom links.
• Advanced Search: Fuzzy/typo-tolerant matching, “/” keyboard shortcut, recent searches, “Did you mean…” suggestions, and a sticky search bar.
• Album Auto-Sync: Paste a shared album URL and new photos appear automatically via WP-Cron – every 15 minutes, hourly, or daily.
• Live Event / Wedding Mode: Open pages refresh on their own and show newly synced photos with no reload – guests drop photos into the shared album and the gallery wall updates itself.
• Multi-Album Galleries & Shared Album Embed: Pull from several shared albums into one gallery with an optional album-tab switcher, embed public shared albums without full OAuth, and bulk-import whole albums.
• Client Picks (Proofing): Visitors heart/select favorites and submit them – emailed to you and saved in the admin, with optional per-photo comments.
• Download as ZIP & Gallery Expiry: Let visitors download the whole gallery as one ZIP, and auto-hide galleries after a chosen date.
• Gallery Protection: Password-protected galleries, right-click/download protection, and automatic server-side logo watermarking with position/opacity/size controls.
• Analytics & Maintenance: Gallery view and lightbox-open analytics with a “most viewed” dashboard, plus a Media Cleanup Manager for per-gallery storage and orphaned photos.
• Image Styling & Performance: Box shadows, per-corner border radius, gradient overlays, and automatic WebP conversion on import.

How to Use – Quick Start

1. Install and activate the Embed Google Photos plugin.
2. In the Gutenberg editor, add the Embed Google Photos block from the “Widgets” block category.
3. Connect your Google account and select photos with the Google Photos Picker.
4. Choose a layout and adjust settings from the right-side settings sidebar.
5. Publish – or use the [google_photos id=..] shortcode anywhere else. Enjoy!

For installation help, see the Installation tab.

Use Cases

• Photographers: Deliver client galleries with proofing, password protection, and ZIP downloads (Pro).
• Bloggers & Travelers: Turn trip albums into timeline or masonry galleries.
• Events & Weddings: Run a live, self-updating photo wall fed by a shared album (Pro).
• Businesses: Showcase portfolios, products, and team events without re-uploading media.

Liked the plugin? Want a new feature? Send us your feedback.

Source Code

You can find the source code, report bugs, and contribute to the development of this plugin on our GitHub repository: Embed Google Photos on GitHub

External Services

This plugin connects to the following external services. Understanding what is sent, and when, helps clarify how your data is handled.

Google Photos (Google OAuth 2.0 + Google Photos Picker API)

What it is and why it is used: This plugin is a Google Photos gallery. To let you pick photos and videos from your own Google Photos account and display them on your site, it connects to Google’s APIs on your server. This connection only happens after you enter your own Google API credentials (Client ID, Client Secret, Refresh Token) in the plugin settings and use the “Select Photos” flow; it is required for the plugin to function.

Which endpoints are contacted and what data is sent: * https://oauth2.googleapis.com/token — your Client ID, Client Secret and Refresh Token are sent to exchange them for a short-lived access token. * https://photospicker.googleapis.com/v1 — the access token is sent (as a Bearer token) to create a picker session, check its status, and list the media items you selected. The selected photos/videos are then downloaded to your own WordPress Media Library.

When it happens: only in wp-admin, triggered by an authenticated administrator connecting an account or clicking “Select Photos”. No data is sent from your visitors’ browsers, and the OAuth credentials/tokens never reach the frontend.

Your credentials and tokens are stored only on your own server (in your WordPress database) and are sent only to Google. This plugin does not transmit them to bPlugins or any other third party.

Google’s terms and privacy policy: * Terms of Service: https://policies.google.com/terms * Privacy Policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy * Google APIs Terms of Service: https://developers.google.com/terms

Schema.org vocabulary (https://schema.org)

What it is and why it is used: On the frontend the plugin outputs Schema.org “ImageObject” structured data (JSON-LD) for each gallery image so search engines such as Google can better understand and index your images (Google Images / rich results, improving SEO).

What data is sent: None. The address “https://schema.org” appears only as the standard @context identifier inside the JSON-LD markup — it is a vocabulary name, not a network request. The plugin does not connect to, load anything from, or send any data to schema.org. All image data stays on your own server.

Terms & privacy: https://schema.org/docs/terms.html

Third-Party Libraries

This plugin bundles the following third-party JavaScript/PHP libraries.

Swiper

• Source: https://swiperjs.com/
• GitHub: https://github.com/nolimits4web/swiper
• License: MIT – https://github.com/nolimits4web/swiper/blob/master/LICENSE
• Purpose: Provides the “Carousel” gallery layout — a touch-enabled slider with autoplay, loop, navigation arrows and pagination dots.

Plyr

• Source: https://plyr.io/
• GitHub: https://github.com/sampotts/plyr
• License: MIT – https://github.com/sampotts/plyr/blob/master/LICENSE.md
• Purpose: A simple, accessible HTML5 media player used to play gallery videos inside the lightbox.

Fancybox (@fancyapps/ui)

• Source: https://fancyapps.com/fancybox/
• GitHub: https://github.com/fancyapps/ui
• License: Fancyapps UI License – https://fancyapps.com/pricing/ (note: this is a proprietary license, not MIT/GPL — see the security/compatibility note below).
• Purpose: The lightbox that opens photos and videos in a full-screen viewer.

Immer

• Source: https://immerjs.github.io/immer/
• GitHub: https://github.com/immerjs/immer
• License: MIT – https://github.com/immerjs/immer/blob/main/LICENSE
• Purpose: Enables safe, immutable updates of block settings inside the Gutenberg editor.

Axios

• Source: https://axios-http.com/
• GitHub: https://github.com/axios/axios
• License: MIT – https://github.com/axios/axios/blob/v1.x/LICENSE
• Purpose: Promise-based HTTP client used for the plugin’s admin/editor AJAX requests.

React Router (react-router-dom)

• Source: https://reactrouter.com/
• GitHub: https://github.com/remix-run/react-router
• License: MIT – https://github.com/remix-run/react-router/blob/main/LICENSE.md
• Purpose: Client-side routing for the plugin’s admin “Demo & Help” dashboard.

Font Awesome

• Source: https://fontawesome.com/
• GitHub: https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome
• License: SIL OFL 1.1 (Fonts), MIT (CSS), CC BY 4.0 (Icons) – https://fontawesome.com/license/free
• Purpose: Provides scalable vector icons used in the block and editor interface.

bpl-tools

• Source: https://github.com/bPlugins/bpl-tools
• License: GPL-2.0-or-later – https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html
• Purpose: Shared utility library providing admin dashboard components and common Gutenberg editor controls.
• External Services: The library may connect to bPlugins, WordPress.org, and Freemius services for product data and checkout functionality. See full details: https://github.com/bPlugins/bpl-tools#external-requests–why-they-are-made

Freemius Lite SDK

• Source: https://bplugins.com/
• GitHub: https://github.com/bPlugins/freemius-lite-sdk
• License: GPL-2.0-or-later – https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html
• Purpose: Provides an opt-in consent form for usage tracking and analytics to help improve the plugin. No data is sent before explicit user consent.
• External Services: Communicates with api.bplugins.com (activation events) and wp.freemius.com (opt-in processing) only after user opt-in. See bPlugins Privacy Policy and Freemius Privacy Policy.