I removed the option to select Google Photos albums using the API. I described it back then here: https://www.svenbluege.de/blog/updates/217-oops-they-did-it-again-changes-to-the-google-photos-api-integration

The new promotion engine needs a small manual change to your order mail if you want to use it. Email templates live in the database and are never overwritten by an update, so your existing New Order template does not know about discounts yet. Without the change the mail still shows the correct total, but the discount row is missing, so the listed items and the total do not add up.

{if isset($data->order->promotions)}
{foreach $data->order->promotions as $promotion}

    
        {$promotion->name}
    
    
        {$promotion->price}
    

{/foreach}
{/if}

The Ajax List layout distributes its thumbnails to pages on its own now, so the options Number of thumbs per page and Number of thumbs on first page are gone - globally and on every menu item which used that layout. Your stored values are simply ignored. What replaces them is a single option Maximum height of the thumbnail area, which defaults to 280px, roughly three rows of thumbnails at the default thumbnail size. Set it once if you want a taller or flatter thumbnail area; there is nothing else to migrate.

#1813 Links which carry an event password (&password=…​) do not open the gallery directly anymore. They land on the password page with the password prefilled, and the visitor has to submit the form once. If you handed such links to your customers they keep working, but they take one more click. See the Minor Changes section below for why.

The password page of an Event now renders a captcha. If you have a template override of html/com_eventgallery/password/default.php and a captcha configured in Joomla, add the captcha to your override, otherwise nobody can pass that form anymore. Your override should also render the prefilled password, otherwise those links lose their value: add value="" to the password input. The shipped template does it like this:

form != false): ?>
    form->getFieldset('password') as $field): ?>
        

            hidden): ?>
                label; ?>
            
            

                input; ?>
            
        
    

Removed support for Google Photos via API. Google shut this down in 2025. You can still use the Google Photos Picker to copy images from Google Photos or use Shared Links to Google Photos albums.

New promotion engine. You can now create discounts which either apply automatically or are unlocked by a promotion code. A promotion reduces the price by a percentage or by a fixed amount, either on the whole cart or only on selected image types, and it can also cover the shipping costs. Condition rules decide when a promotion is active, from a simple cart value threshold up to composite rules like "the cart contains 5 images of image type A and 1 image of image type B". Promotions can be limited to a period of time and combined or kept exclusive via a priority.

#1806 New sharing option Send Image by eMail. The existing eMail sharing only puts a link into the mail. The new option sends the image itself, embedded into the mail, so the recipient sees the picture right away and does not have to follow a link. It uses the same image size the download uses: if menu:Event Gallery[Options > Social > Use Original Files] allows the visitor to get the original image, the original goes out, otherwise the largest thumbnail does.

#842 The Ajax List distributes its thumbnails on its own. The layout no longer assigns a fixed number of thumbnails to each page. It measures how many fit into a row at the current window width and fills up as many rows as the new option menu:Event Gallery[Options > Event - Ajax List > Maximum height of the thumbnail area] allows. Every page is filled completely, only the last one holds the remainder.

#1809 New menu item type Event Access. It shows a landing page with a single password field. The visitor enters the password of a password-protected Event and lands directly in that gallery. Photographers can hand out one link plus a password instead of a personal link per customer.

#1722 Sorting Events in the Joomla backend takes the ordering asc/desc for moving the Events into the right direction into account. Moving items up/down will now also use your current filter so you can sort items as expected even if there are filtered out Events in between.

#1704 Improve the layout of the password page for events to make its appeal more modern.

#1763 Adding Joomla 7 support by removing deprecated code and adjusting to modern coding standards.

Extended the FAQ with the steps to switch from on-demand rendering to pre-rendered images.

#1807 Switching between on-demand and pre-rendered images does not require deleting htaccess/webconfig files anymore.

#1808 The backend is full of tabs for different config options. The last open tab will re-open after hitting the save-button.

#1810, #1813 The password page of an Event uses the same brute force protection and the same captcha. Until now a wrong password only added a five second delay after ten tries, kept in the session, which a bot could reset by dropping its cookies - and which tied up a PHP process for every attempt. Now the attempts are counted per session and per IP address, and once the budget is used up even the right password is refused for an hour. Both password pages share one budget.

#1812 The Track my Order page got the same brute force protection. Order numbers are handed out one after the other, so the email address was the only thing somebody had to guess to see the address, the phone number and the download links of an order. Failed lookups are now counted per session and per IP address, ten per hour. The two forms use separate budgets, so guessing order numbers does not lock anybody out of a protected Event.

#1814 Email templates are rendered under a security policy now. A template may use placeholders, {if}, {foreach} and the usual modifiers like upper, truncate or date_format exactly as before, but it can no longer call a static method of a PHP class, read a file of the server with {include file="…​"}, or look at $_SERVER, $_ENV and PHP constants. Editing an email template only asks for the Edit permission of Event Gallery, which is a lot less than a Super User, and without the policy such a template was able to run code on the server. Every shipped template is unaffected. Should a template of yours use one of the blocked constructs it now reports an error instead of rendering.

#1815 Payments are better verified before an order counts as paid. Stripe now checks that the checkout session really was paid and that it was paid in the amount and the currency of the order, and PayPal checks that the money went to the configured receiver account and matches the amount and currency of the order. A payment which does not match leaves the order waiting for payment and writes the reason into the plugin log, so look there if an order stays unpaid unexpectedly.

#1811 The token in the download links of an order now comes from the cryptographic random source instead of uniqid(). uniqid() is mostly the current time, which made the tokens of orders placed around the same moment similar enough to be worth guessing. Links which are already out in your customers' mailboxes keep working - only orders placed from this version on get the new token.

#1738 Videos are not displayed in the lightbox if they are inserted with the content plugin in thumbnail mode.

#1802 Fixes an exception while adding new tags to Events using the batch tool.

#1711 Improve the icons for the two content plugin buttons.

#1711 The content tags are now editable in the content editor. Place your cursor in a content tag or select it, click the Event Gallery Event content button and you can edit this tag.

#1714 Content Plugin for Events: Allow more configuration options for the simple thumbnails

#1715 Avoid devision by zero exception in the download log

#1687 a new shipping method type for mixed orders is available in Event Gallery Extended. A mixed order is an order that contains digital and physical items. It will allow users to download digital items after the physical items in the order got shipped.

#1703 Massive performance boost if you have many menu items! For each link Event Gallery needs to find the right menu item. The more links and menu items, the slower is the site. This has been fixed with a request-based LRU-cache.

#1681 The Sync Database process can sometimes not create new events because of missing default values in the database structure.

#1689 Fixes the client-side form validation for email addresses in the checkout.

#1696 Long descriptions could cause an exception while saving them in the Smart Search Plugin of Event Gallery.

#1666 In the backoffice you can enter a comment to an order which is only visible for backoffice users.

#1667 Adding a new view for order statistics. This page is experimental. Let me know if that content is useful for you or you need more data.

#1679 Removed the Google Photos migration tool. Google Photos access via API is not working for nearly a year, so the migration tool will no longer work. Note: Google Photos Shared pages are not affected here!

#1680 The CLI interface now allows publishing new Events and skip the processing of existing Events with new command line parameters. Example: "joomla.php eventgallery:sync -o=true"

#1676 Avoid the error "The number of variables must match the number of parameters in the prepared statement" with some database drivers.

#1678 The zip file for the images of an order which can be created in the Event Gallery backend added the file extension .jpg sometimes twice.

#1665 Import the Guided Tour only in Joomla 5/6 to avoid errors while installing Event Gallery on Joomla 4.

#1664 New email template could cause an exception if now attachments had been selected.

#1658 A little z-index for the icons on images is required. Otherwise, the description overlay makes a click on the cart/sharing icons impossible.

#1653 Fixes the handling of IPTC-Data if they contain specific characters.

#1657 A broken German language file leads to a broken Event Edit Page in the backend

#1658 Z-Index for Sharing-Icons container was unnecessarily high

#1659 The category list is capable of showing filtered links to published/unpublished/trashed items. But this does not work with Event Gallery yet. Those links are now hidden.

#1353 support multiple URLs for Google Photos with Shared Links. This will help to get around the need to creating multiple Events because of the limitation in the number of images which can be scraped from one URL.

#1652 The recursive displaying of Events in categories did not work.

#855 Switching all SQL statements to prepared statements. This will increase the level of security when it comes to SQL injection.

#1633 massive rework of the add2cart page. Improved the UI for selecting the right format for an image.

#1634 The cart and checkout review has a new UI.

#1634 The mini-cart has a new UI.

#1635 The share dialog has a new UI.

#1636 Replace the dialog/overlay with the modern HTML elemenet dialog.

#1637 Image List Layouet: Do not add the first image with a higher row height if it is the only image in that row. This typically looks not so good on mobile or in modules in the sidebar.

#1638 The edit-buttons on the checkout review page are now buttons instead of ugly links.

#1639 Updated Stripe SKD to version 19.1.0

Removed the Flickr settings in the main options completely. This has moved to the Flickr Account-section of Event Gallery. A global value for Flickr Secret was removed from the previous version, but the config option was still available.

The HTML/CSS of the cart/checkout pages has changed. It leverages now the latest Bootstrap form definitions. If you use the default Joomla template or any other Bootstrap 5-based template, you’re fine. If not, please double check the cart/checkout pages.

If you use Flickr but did not create a Flickr Account in Event Gallery, then this is madatory now.

#1617 Selling videos is not possible. For this, there are new configuration options for image types to define if an image type is compatible with images and/or videos.

#1618 Improve the form layout of the cart and the address page by using modern Bootstrap CSS. It is included in the default Joomla template.

#1608 removed the configuration option for loading uncompressed css/js. Since 5.5.0 those files are no longer part of the install package, to this option can crash your site.

#1609 the dialog for the image content plugin where you can select folders and images has now two independently scrollable panels.

#1585 improve dark mode support of the cards in the cart and checkout process.

#1619 ordering videos from Flickr is now possible using the download shipping method. The original video file is provided for download after purchase.

improved PHP 8.4 support

#1626 remove the global configuration parameter for Flickr and the default Flickr key. If you want to use Flickr, create at least one Flickr account in Event Gallery. Reminder: Flickr Pro is required to get sufficient data from the Flickr API.

#1627 improve the buttons on the mnitcart, cart and checkout review page.

The database format changed for Flickr Events. Clear the cache for Flickr in Event Gallery. Itll automatically refresh the data from Flickr and populate the new fields.

#1606 the Event Module has now a new option to controll the behavior of the last image in case the imagelist layout is used. You can define if the last image should fill the remaining space or if its size is limited.

catch up with a change in how Google renders a shared page. The video detection was broken. Not videos are detected correctly until the next change.

#1605 Flickr can deliver thumbnails in 3k and 4k length of the longer edge of an image. Event Gallery supports that now and can deliver a higher quality of images in the lightbox.

#1584 Ajax Layout - selecting the first image based on the hast in the url works again

#1554 Refreshed the style of thumbnails. They do now have rounded corners and a slight drop shadow. That might cause some trouble with your customization. Please double-check and adjust after installing this release.

#1555 Reduced the number of generated thumbnails. By default, those sizes are generated now: 160, 320, 512, 720, 1024, 1440, 1600

#1563 Uploading MP4 files was not possible if images are pre-calculated.

#1462 The imagelist layout for Events in the Events-module has a new parameter to control the behavior of the last line in the layout. You can now select if the last row should be stretched over the full width or not.

#1463 Allow selecting a default Event Type in the components configuration. This setting is used for preselecting the right folder type when creating a new Event.

Some minor improvements for light/dark mode in the upload, sync database and thumnbail creator.

Bug Fixes

#1464 some images can contain EXIF-data which will make the upload or reading image metadata fail. This is handled now gracefully.

#1456 Breakpoints are configurable in the component and modules. This will avoid the need for custom CSS to just change the size of thumbnails or the number of items per row. Check the manual for details.

#1455 remove Google Photos Import since it will no longer working after Google changes the API access.

#1457 under rare conditions an error like MimeType not in in allowed list image/jpeg, image/gif, image/png, image/webp, video/mp4 could show up for local images. This is fixed.

#1458 the content plugin did not output alt-attributes for single images.

#1456 Breakpoints are configurable in the component and modules. This will avoid the need for custom CSS to just change the size of thumbnails or the number of items per row. Check the manual for details.

#1455 remove Google Photos Import since it will no longer working after Google changes the API access.

#1451 Adding a CLI extension to migrate from Google Photos to local storage or S3 storage. Check https://www.svenbluege.de/blog/updates/217-oops-they-did-it-again-changes-to-the-google-photos-api-integration for details. Do the change until 25.3.2025!

#1436 Introducing a new plugin to support the web service API going forward. The first use case is the tracking of image hits. An image hit is counted when the lightbox is opened. This behavior can be disabled in the components options and applies only to local and S3 images.

#1437 Adding better support for dark mode by fixing the CSS classes for select boxes.

#1439 The checkout review page now includes an additional checkbox. While it is labeled as a newsletter opt-in by default, you can repurpose it for other uses by simply modifying the localization keys. The selected value is stored with the order for future reference. The default mail template for order confirmation contains this option if the user selects the opt-in switch.

#1449 restore compatibility with the current state of Joomla 6

#1432 Avoid overriding the regular fontawesome CSS and uglify other parts of the page - second try!

#1431 Google Photos will be no longer supported after May 2025 because Google will make their images unaccessible through their API. If you need to migrate, this is a pain. With this version, I added a link on the list of Events which allows you to copy the Event and download all the images to your local webspace.

#1433 A new button on the Event page in the backend can be used to reset the hit counter for an Event.

#1432 Avoid overriding the regular fontawesome CSS and uglify other parts of the page.