A couple of years ago Google started Picasa Web Albums. A great place to upload your photos and make them available on the internet. By providing an API, getting data directly from the Google servers has been possible. The API was pretty straightforward, and it was more or less comfortable to show Picasa Albums on any website. Then they introduced Google+ and Google Photos. But the Picasa Web API remained working.

While I provide support, I see a lot of Joomla sites. Most of them can improve their security by some simple steps. Here are my favorite tips to secure a Joomla site.

Don't use the admin user. If the username is known, it is much easier to guess the password. There are a lot of brute force requests to the login form which are usually undetected. You could see that in your server log files, but I guess you don't know where they are located, or you don't check them. So create new superuser accounts and delete the admin account.

We all know that we need to take care about data privacy stuff until 25th of May. That is right for my website, too. But I also need to make sure Event Gallery is covered and help you to get compliant.

The next release will add a new chapter in the manual which describes, how Event Gallery collects data.

Also, there will be some changes codewise. Right now there are a couple of external scripts loaded. Even if this is in the backend, I remove them to avoid that somebody has to deal with that.

Using just the main component of Event Gallery might get boring. So what should you do? Why not using Event Gallery as your personal image server? Just add images to your articles. It is as easy as this. Just have a look at the video below.

Event Gallery is more than just a gallery component. Besides the fact that you can sell images, you can use it to manage your image content. Upload your image and insert them into an article. Event Gallery will take care of scaling the images to the right format and offers the lightbox out of the box. Adding simple thumbnails is one thing you can do. Having a full gallery in an article is possible as well. If you need just a bunch of images to tease your stuff and want to show the rest of the photos in a lightbox: that is possible! With the content plugin of Event Gallery you can do a lot of magic stuff.

This weekend Google switched off the option to modify any album using their Picasa API. The tool I provided basically stopped working from on day to another. You can't switch the visibility of an album. Does this mean you can't use new albums with Event Gallery? No! It still works. It just requires you to perform one more step. You need to allow Event Gallery to access your album data. Afterwards you can even use those protected albums! This was not possible before. Let's see how long this works.

If case you have a valid subscription you can already try it by getting the latest build from here Alpha Release.

Update: Event Gallery 3.7.0 is available and can access protected Google albums.

Google Picasa is retired now, your old albums are only available in the archive. But nothing is lost! You can still use Event Gallery to display your Google Photos images on your Joomla! website.The trick is to mark your album as public or protected. There is no way to do that using the Google Photos website. But there is help: https://www.svenbluege.de/picasa/v1.1/. Use this website to get your albumid, userid and the picasakey. You can change the visibility of your albums too. This tool is build into Event Gallery 3.6 (working version here with a subscription) so you can select your events directly.

I'm currently encountering a lot of brute force attacks which try to guess the admin password of my site. This is quite annoying and causes more server load and bandwidth usage. I wrote a Joomla! plugin to stop this as soon as possible. Read more after the jump.

You want to upload new images but you're out of disk space. I guess you all know this situation. Moving your images to Flickr or Google Picasa is not what you want. Actually Google Picasa is what you want if that would be supported after May 2016 which currently nobody knows. I have 4 GB images uploaded to my website. With its adaptive rendering approach, Event Gallery adds roughly 4 GB for the cached thumbnails. Too much for my new hosting provider. So I'm in need for a solution.