Slickr Flickr 1.30 Has Enhanced Galleria Support

Version 1.30 of Slickr Flickr, released 18th July, has a few new features in both the standard and Pro editions plus a few bug fixes. In the standard edition the work was focussed on supporting the new galleria themes and in the Pro edition the big new feature is ‘random photos’.

New Features

All Galleria Themes/Skins Now Supported

In the previous versions of Slickr Flickr I was using the dimensions of CSS elements as defined in the slickr-flickr.css file to control the size of the galleria. This caused a problem for some galleria themes which wanted to make the galleria larger than the slickr-flickr-galleria container. This restriction has now been removed and Slickr Flickr works well with classic, widescreen, folio, twelve and miniml themes.

Galleria Themes Loaded Dynamically

In the new release, there is no slickr-flickr CSS at all that affects the galleria: what slickr-flickr does is calculate the ‘height’ and ‘width’ parameters for the ‘classic’ theme if the user does not specify them. Slickr Flickr does not need to create a default height for the other themes as these calculate the required galleria dimensions themselves.

As part of the change, I decided to load the galleria theme dynamically rather than the static method of including a javascript file and a CSS file. The advantage of this approach is that there is less dependency on the specific naming and location of the galleria theme files.

I had hoped that with this dynamic loading that I could have multiple gallerias on the same page with different themes – e.g. maybe ‘folio’ in the main content section and a small ‘classic’ galleria in a sidebar or footer widget. However, this did not work out as the loadTheme was applied to all gallerias on the page. Maybe that is something the Galleria developer might address in a future release?

Large Photo Gallerias

Also the old galleria only worked for ‘small’ (240×180), ‘medium'(500×375) and ‘medium 640’ (640×480) standard Flickr photo size but not for ‘large’ (1024×768) photos. On a user request I have now added support for large photos, in both the old Galleria 1.0 and for the classic theme in Galleria versions 1.2 and 1.2.3.

Random Photos (for Pro Users)

The ability to display a small number of random photos from a larger collection has been requested by a few users.

Click for a demo the random photos feature

ShutterBox LightBox

If you using the ShutterBox Reloaded plugin you must now use the the ‘Shutterset’ option (the first option) when configuring ShutterBox. This option allows you to have multiple galleries on the page.

Slickr Flickr sets the ‘rel’ element of the photo link with a random group id which groups all the photos in the same collection together into the same ‘shutterset’. If this option is not chosen then all the photos on the page are available in the same lightbox slideshow.

Bug Fixes

This release also fixed a few bugs:

• large Galleria photos are now displayed without scrollbars
• descriptions for the lightbox are no longer passed when not required
• an empty slideshow link parameter no longer results in an link to the page
• autoplay=”off” slideshow option is now working

Not Implemented Yet

I had intended to release support for ‘private photos’ however ran into problems with the new Flickr Open Authentication mechanism which is required to make an authenticated connection to Flickr. I decided I could not hold up this release any longer so it will either be in an interim release later this month or in August.

Updated by Russell.