Album Importer for Google Photos

Album Importer for Google Photos lets you quickly import images from a public Google Photos album into your WordPress site and show them as a gallery. Add the block to any post or page, paste a Google Photos album URL, and start the import — the images are added to your Media Library and displayed automatically.

Basic Usage

1. Create or edit a post/page where you want the gallery.
2. Add the “Google Photos Album” block.
3. From Google Photos, share your album and copy the public link.
4. Paste the album URL into the block.
5. Click Start Import.
6. Wait for completion — the gallery is created automatically.

Album URL Format

Use a publicly shared Google Photos album URL, for example:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

External services

This plugin relies on Google Photos (a third-party service operated by Google LLC) to read and import publicly shared album content. No data is sent to any external service unless an authorized user explicitly provides a Google Photos album URL to the plugin. There are two entry points that trigger requests to Google:

1. The “Album Importer for Google Photos” block in the post/page editor — pasting an album URL and clicking “Start Import”.
2. The “Import from Google Photos” button that the plugin adds to the media-selection modal of core Image, Gallery, Cover, and Media & Text blocks — pasting an album URL into the modal and clicking “Load album”.

Google Photos

What it is and what it is used for: Google Photos is Google’s photo hosting and sharing service. The plugin uses it to fetch the contents of a publicly shared album so the images can be saved into the WordPress media library and rendered as a gallery.

What data is sent and when:

• Verify the album (server -> Google). When an authorized editor pastes an album URL and triggers verification (clicking “Start Import” in the block, or “Load album” in the media-library modal), the plugin makes a server-side HTTP GET request to the album URL on photos.google.com or photos.app.goo.gl to retrieve the album’s public HTML page and parse the list of image URLs.
• Render thumbnail previews (browser -> Google). After verification returns the list of images, the plugin renders thumbnails directly in the editor by setting each image URL as the src of an <img> tag. This causes the editor user’s browser to make HTTP GET requests to lh3.googleusercontent.com for each thumbnail.
• Filename inference (server -> Google). For each image to be imported, the plugin makes a server-side HTTP HEAD request to lh3.googleusercontent.com to read the Content-Disposition header (the import continues even if this request fails).
• Image download (server -> Google). For each image, the plugin issues a server-side HTTP GET request to lh3.googleusercontent.com to download the image bytes and store them as a WordPress media attachment.
• No user credentials, account information, or telemetry are collected or transmitted by the plugin. The only data the plugin sends is the album URL the editor pastes (and the derived image URLs from that album).

Use of Google’s services is subject to Google’s terms:

• Google Terms of Service
• Google Privacy Policy

Source Code

The full, unminified source code for this plugin — including the JavaScript and CSS sources used to generate the compiled files in assets/js/build/ and blocks/build/ — is publicly available on GitHub.

Build tools and instructions:

• JavaScript and CSS are built with @wordpress/scripts (webpack) via npm.
• PHP dependencies are managed with Composer.
• To build the plugin from source, clone the repository and run:
  1. npm ci
  2. npm run build
  3. composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader
• A build.sh script in the repository produces a distributable ZIP that mirrors the version published here.
• JavaScript and SCSS sources are located in assets/js/src/ (e.g. style.scss) and blocks/src/album/ (e.g. editor.scss). They are compiled by @wordpress/scripts into the assets/js/build/ and blocks/build/ directories.