What we’ve changed.

Clearer statistics, chapter galleries load completely again, and safer downloads.

• Improved (Pro): “Most popular photos” in the statistics shows one row per list — favorites, views, downloads and ordered prints — in rank order, with the count written under each photo. Each row switches between the top 10, 50 and 100.
• Improved (Pro): “Latest activity” shows small previews of the photos involved and is exactly as tall as the chart next to it. A click opens the photos large — right away, and sharp as soon as the full preview has loaded. With the privacy switch off, Google Drive previews in the dashboard load straight from Google, as in the gallery.
• Improved (Pro): an expanded visitor shows three tabs — favorites, downloads (including whole-gallery and selection ZIPs) and the photos they opened most often.
• Fixed (Pro): in galleries with chapters that load more photos while scrolling, the chapters stayed empty when the main folder fit into the first batch; with more photos, the first ones appeared twice.
• Fixed: files with the same name could end up twice under one name in a download, and one photo overwrote the other when unzipping. Every file now gets its own name.
• Fixed: when the server-side ZIP (the fallback for older browsers) could not load a file from the cloud, the file was missing without a word. The ZIP now contains a list of the missing files.
• Fixed: the shortcode option per_page had no effect.
• Improved: when you unpublish, trash or delete a gallery, its preview images cached on your server are deleted too. While a gallery is not published, you still see its previews in the dashboard, but they are no longer stored under a public address.
• Fixed: the daily clean-up of cached preview images could stop running; it is now rescheduled automatically.
• Fixed: in the folder download (Chrome and Edge), a photo that could not be loaded left an empty file behind; it is now removed.

Videos in the gallery, a new statistics dashboard and a privacy switch.

• New: videos. Videos in the gallery folder appear in the grid with a play icon and play in the lightbox. Large files start within seconds, because the plugin passes them on in pieces instead of loading the whole file first — and seeking works. Google Drive videos get a poster frame, Dropbox videos a dark tile.
• New: per gallery you decide whether videos go into “Download all”. Off by default, because a film can be several gigabytes. Single downloads and selections always include videos.
• New: if the browser cannot play a video (for example HEVC without codec, MKV or AVI), the lightbox shows a short note instead of a black player, with a download button when downloads are allowed.
• Fixed: when the free version runs with an active Pro license, the gallery no longer shows the print shop button “Order prints from selection”.
• New (Pro): statistics dashboard. One overview for all galleries with time ranges, visitors, views, favorites and downloads compared with the previous period, an activity chart and a feed of what your clients did last. Each gallery gets its own page: the most-loved photos as a podium, a compact visitor list with each visitor’s favorites, “copy file names” for Lightroom, a CSV per visitor, and reset. A small widget on the WordPress dashboard shows the last 7 days.
• New (Pro): Settings → Statistics turns statistics on automatically for new galleries.
• Improved (Pro): your own visits, downloads and favorites no longer count in the statistics while you are logged in as someone who can edit the gallery.
• Fixed (Pro): a new visitor no longer counts twice, and a "Download all" in the browser counts each file once instead of twice. The comparison with the previous period reappears once that period lies entirely after the update.
• Fixed (Pro): print orders are limited per visitor and per email address. One order now holds up to 150 photos, and the gallery says so when more are selected — before, the order page silently dropped everything after the first 50. The order CSV no longer lets spreadsheet formulas from customer fields run in Excel.
• New: privacy switch. Settings → Advanced → Privacy → “Load previews and videos through this website”: visitors’ browsers then only connect to your site, never to Google or Dropbox. On for new installations; existing sites keep their behaviour until you switch it on. The suggested privacy policy text follows the setting.
• Improved: the settings are split into tabs — cloud storage, design, texts and advanced.
• Improved (Pro): simpler menu — All galleries, New gallery, Dashboard, Print shop (orders and print settings as tabs, with the number of new orders) and Settings with an extra Statistics tab.
• Improved: “Download all” works for archives over 4 GB and for large videos. Files from 256 MB are streamed instead of being loaded into memory, a dropped connection resumes, and macOS Archive Utility opens the archives.
• Fixed: galleries behind a page cache stopped loading photos after 12–24 hours. Galleries now use an access key that is bound to their page and renewed every 30 days. Password-protected galleries stay protected: the photo list, videos and downloads check the page password on every request.
• Fixed (Pro): the print order page only opens from the gallery. Before, anyone who knew a gallery number could see its photo list there, even for a password-protected gallery.
• Fixed (Pro): depending on the time zone, the statistics counted repeat views twice or missed real visits.
• Fixed (Pro): “Order prints” stays off while only videos are selected, quantities are capped at 99, and without Pro the print page shows a short note instead of the raw shortcode.
• Fixed: with downloads switched off, the video player no longer offers “Save video as” in its right-click menu.

Fixes: PayPal link in the order email, keyboard lightbox, galleries in tabs.

• Fixed: the “Pay now via PayPal” button in the order confirmation email now also works when a PayPal email address (instead of a PayPal.Me name) is set in the print shop — and it passes your shop currency.
• Fixed: buttons that cannot do anything at the moment (“Load more”, “Download favorites”, “Download selection”, “Clear selection”) were visible anyway.
• Fixed: a gallery inside a tab or accordion that is closed when the page loads (Elementor and other page builders) now lays out as soon as it is opened.
• Fixed: clicking “Show favorites only” while images were still loading left the view incomplete.
• Fixed: umlauts and other non-ASCII characters in the gallery title are kept in the ZIP file name.
• Fixed: in folders with more than 20,000 images, the images beyond that could not be opened or downloaded.
• Improved: the lightbox opens with the keyboard (Enter or Space on an image). Focus stays inside the lightbox and returns to the image when it closes.

Layouts, chapters, watermark — and a page for every new gallery.

• Pro: four layouts instead of one — justified rows, a masonry pinboard, a square grid, or a filmstrip that scrolls sideways. Spacing between the images (0 px for a seamless mosaic) and a corner radius are set per gallery.
• Pro: the rest of the look, also per gallery: a hover effect (zoom, darken or none), file-name captions on hover or always visible, and a light or dark lightbox with an optional thumbnail strip for quick navigation.
• Pro: watermark. Your logo on every preview — grid and lightbox — with position, size and opacity of your choice. Downloads stay clean: they stream the original file, never the watermarked preview.
• Pro: chapters. Every subfolder of the gallery folder becomes its own section with a heading — “Getting ready”, “Ceremony”, “Party” — with a jump navigation above the grid. A leading number in a folder name sets the order and is not shown. Favorites, lightbox and downloads work across all chapters, and “Download all” keeps the chapters as folders inside the ZIP.
• Pro: the watch folder can create the page as well — a copy of a template page you build once, with its Cloud Gallery block, Elementor widget or shortcode pointed at the new gallery. Title and status follow the gallery. The template’s password is deliberately not copied, so every client gets their own.
• Fixed: a single-image download now waits while a ZIP download is running, with a short note, instead of quietly breaking the archive being built.
• Fixed: no more “textdomain loaded too early” notice in the debug log after activating the plugin.
• Fixed: after activation you land on the settings page again instead of the still-empty gallery list.

The block and the Elementor widget are easier to find.

• The box in the gallery sidebar is now called “Add to a page” and lists all three ways to show a gallery: the block, the Elementor widget and the shortcode. It used to be called “Shortcode” — which hid the block from exactly the people looking for a way around shortcodes.
• A one-time pointer in the gallery list and in the gallery editor points at that box, so the block and the widget also reach people who dismissed the update notice.
• Fixed: in the title image settings, a label could stay at the end of one line while its dropdown moved to the next.

Gallery titles with an "&" or an apostrophe are readable again.

• Fixed: an "&", an apostrophe or quotation marks in a gallery title were shown as HTML code — "Anna & Tom" appeared as "Anna & Tom". This affected the preview card in the block editor, the title image above a gallery, the gallery pickers in the block and the Elementor widget, the gallery list, the statistics dashboard, print-order emails and the order CSV export.
• Fixed: the folder inside a bulk-download ZIP carried the same HTML code in its name.

Block editor, Elementor and automatic galleries.

• New "Cloud Gallery" block for the block editor: pick a gallery from a list and see a preview right in the editor — no shortcode needed.
• Elementor widget "Cloud Gallery" with its own loading-mode and image-size overrides; galleries initialise inside the Elementor preview.
• Folder picker: set a main folder once in the settings, then choose each gallery folder from a dropdown — no more copying folder URLs or typing paths.
• Connection test: one click checks the access token, folder listing, a real image download and the cache folder — with a plain-language hint for anything that fails.
• Pro: title image above the grid — from the gallery folder or the media library, with the gallery title and a subtitle, a soft gradient or a darkened overlay, at content width or edge to edge.
• Pro: create a gallery straight from the editor — pick a subfolder in the block or the Elementor widget and the gallery is created on the spot.
• Pro: automatic galleries — new subfolders in your main folder become galleries by themselves, with settings copied from a template gallery, as a draft or published directly.
• Fixed: ZIP filenames contained HTML character codes when the gallery title had an apostrophe or special characters.

The macOS ZIP problem finally solved.

• Fixed: ZIP downloads would not open in the macOS Archive Utility. The record at the end of the archive declared its table of contents as "0 bytes", so macOS found nothing readable while more tolerant tools opened the very same file fine. This affected every streaming download since 1.13.2, regardless of gallery size.
• Fixed: the server-side fallback used for very large galleries now writes each entry’s size and checksum before the data, so strict extractors can read those archives too.
• Thanks to Chris Tess, whose persistent testing made this diagnosis possible.

A second cause behind the macOS ZIP problem.

• Fixed: entries were marked as coming from a Unix system but carried no file type and no permissions, so macOS did not recognise anything readable inside. Every file is now stored as a regular file with normal read permissions. Applies to all bulk downloads (all images, selection, favorites).

First fix for ZIP downloads on macOS.

• Fixed: each entry’s size and checksum are now written into its own header instead of after the data, so extractors that read an archive front to back can open it. Thanks to Chris Tess for the detailed report.

Bulk download rebuilt, plus robustness and security.

• Whole galleries and selections now save straight to the Downloads folder as a regular ZIP in every modern browser — no more folder-permission prompt in Chrome/Edge. The streaming path with no memory limit (multi-gigabyte galleries included) had previously been disabled by an overly strict internal check and never actually ran.
• A ZIP is no longer reported as "done" when files failed to download. Partial results now say exactly how many of how many images are missing.
• ZIP archives carry the UTF-8 filename flag, so names with umlauts or accents (e.g. "Müller_001.jpg") extract correctly in Windows Explorer.
• Security: the admin preview and folder endpoints now require the "manage options" capability instead of "edit posts", so lower-privileged users cannot probe the connected cloud account.
• Image cache: thumbnails are downloaded to a temporary file and then moved into place — an interrupted download no longer leaves a broken image behind that is then served forever.

Security, speed and a statistics page that scales.

• Security: unpublished galleries (draft, private, trashed) no longer hand out original files — the guard now covers single-file, ZIP and manifest downloads as well.
• Speed: the folder listing from Drive/Dropbox is cached briefly, so concurrent visitors trigger one API call per page instead of one per view.
• Dropbox galleries now honour the sort order and "images per page" setting, so the grid and ZIP order match — as Google Drive already did.
• The bundled German translation loads again on self-hosted and Pro installations.
• Pro: the statistics detail page is now collapsible, with a per-section limit and real pagination — instead of a 10,000-pixel scroll.
• Pro: two new columns in the gallery list toggle statistics and the print shop without opening the gallery.

Accepted into the WordPress.org plugin directory.

• Faster bulk download: images are fetched in parallel or built as a streaming ZIP depending on the browser, typically cutting the wait by four to six times. The per-gallery limit rose from 5,000 to 25,000 files.
• Selection download as a ZIP moved from Pro back into the free version.
• New shortcode names [ccgal_gallery] and [ccgal_print]. Existing pages are migrated automatically on update.
• Video files are hidden from galleries for now (images only). Existing videos in connected cloud folders are left untouched.
• Extensive work for the WordPress.org review: consistent naming prefixes throughout the plugin, WordPress’s own HTTP layer instead of cURL, and additional security checks on the public endpoints.

Submission build for WordPress.org review.

• Plugin Check 0/0 errors — passes wp.org Plugin Check across all categories.
• Refactored autoloader naming conventions to match wp.org standards.
• Removed all bundled third-party libraries that ship via Composer.
• PayPal payment radio relabeled from "PayPal (paypal.me)" to simply "PayPal".
• Improved validation messages on the print order form.

Performance + accessibility pass.

• Lazy-load heuristic now respects users with prefers-reduced-data.
• Lightbox keyboard navigation: Home/End jump to first/last image.
• WCAG 2.2 AA contrast adjustments on default theme.
• Bug fix: thumbnail cache rebuild was triggered too aggressively after a single new upload.

Print shop hardening.

• New shortcode [ccgal_print] renders the print order page anywhere.
• Order management table: filterable by status (New / Confirmed / Shipped).
• Automated customer confirmation email — fully translatable.
• Bug fix: shipping cost calculation rounded incorrectly when free-shipping threshold was met by exactly the last cent.

Pro tier launched via Freemius.

• Visitor statistics dashboard.
• CSV export of favorites and order tracking.
• ZIP selection download.
• Per-gallery design tokens (accent / hover / border colors).