Customer Cloud Gallery – Google Drive & Dropbox Image Gallery

Tired of subscribing to yet another photo service just to share galleries with your clients? Customer Cloud Gallery lets you deliver beautiful client photo galleries straight from your own Google Drive or Dropbox — on your own WordPress site, with no extra monthly fees. Connect the Drive or Dropbox folder you already use, add the "Cloud Gallery" block (or the Elementor widget, or a shortcode), and you get a fast, mobile-friendly gallery with downloads, favorites and optional password protection. Your originals stay in the cloud; the plugin streams thumbnails and full-resolution files on demand — so your site stays fast, your hosting disk stays empty, and there are no monthly gallery-hosting fees and no per-gallery limits. Who it's for

• Photographers delivering client work — wedding, portrait, family, event, newborn, real-estate and product photography
• Studios & agencies that want galleries on their own domain and brand
• Schools, clubs & teams sharing event photos with parents and members
• Anyone who already keeps photos in Google Drive or Dropbox

What you get (Free)

• Google Drive and Dropbox — connect one or both; pick the folder per gallery
• Folder picker — set your main folder once, then choose each gallery's subfolder from a dropdown (no more copying folder URLs)
• Block editor & Elementor — insert the "Cloud Gallery" block or Elementor widget and pick your gallery from a list with a live preview; the shortcode still works in any other builder
• Fast lazy-loading grid with full-screen lightbox, keyboard navigation and mobile swipe
• Client favorites — visitors heart their picks and filter to just those
• Downloads done right — single originals, a whole-gallery ZIP, or a visitor's hand-picked selection as one streaming ZIP (multi-GB galleries work)
• Optional password protection for client-only delivery — or keep it public
• GDPR-ready cookie control — master on/off switch per gallery; visitors can clear their cookie
• Design options — accent, hover and border colours
• Works with any theme and builder — block, Elementor widget or shortcode, no template editing

Your files never touch our servers — Drive/Dropbox are accessed with your own OAuth credentials (see "External Services" below). Earn money with Pro Don't just save on fees — earn real money from your galleries. The Pro print shop lets your clients order professional prints right inside their gallery: you set the formats, paper types, prices and shipping, and orders arrive by e-mail with payment via PayPal or SEPA bank transfer. No marketplace commission, no card-processing setup. Pro also adds:

• Print shop — clients order prints directly from each gallery, with full order management (New → Confirmed → Shipped)
• Title image — a cover photo from the folder or your media library above the grid, with the gallery title and a subtitle on it, adjustable height, soft gradient and an edge-to-edge option
• Create galleries from the editor — in the block or the Elementor widget, pick a subfolder of your main folder and the gallery is created on the spot
• Automatic galleries (watch folder) — new subfolders in your main folder become galleries automatically; a notice in the gallery list tells you what was created
• A page for every automatic gallery — the watch folder clones a template page for each new gallery, with the block, Elementor widget or shortcode already pointed at it
• Chapters — subfolders of the gallery folder become sections with headings and a jump navigation
• Layouts — masonry, square grid or filmstrip besides the justified rows, plus spacing and corner radius per gallery
• Hover, captions & lightbox — hover effect of your choice, file-name captions, light or dark lightbox with a thumbnail strip
• Watermark on previews — your logo on every preview; downloads stay clean
• Visitor statistics dashboard — page views, most-loved photos and top downloads, per gallery and per visitor
• CSV export of client favourite selections — ideal for prepping an album or print run
• Priority support

The Free plugin above is complete and fully functional on its own — Pro adds the print shop, design and automation features, statistics and exports. Get the most out of it

1. Keep one Drive/Dropbox folder per client or event — the gallery mirrors it.
2. Create a gallery, password-protect the page, and send your client the link.
3. Switch on the Pro print shop to take print orders automatically.

Why cloud storage? Uploading full-resolution galleries to your web server is slow, wastes disk quota, and makes migration painful. With Customer Cloud Gallery the originals stay in Drive or Dropbox — the plugin fetches thumbnails on first request, caches them locally, and streams originals on demand. Server load is minimal even for 4K RAW previews. Security

• OAuth tokens are stored AES-256-CBC encrypted using WordPress's AUTH_KEY
• Per-gallery nonces prevent cross-gallery file access (IDOR protection)
• All file-serving endpoints verify that the requested file actually belongs to the requested gallery
• Download nonces expire after 24 hours
• Cache directory blocks PHP execution and directory listing via .htaccess
• Visitor cookies are httponly + SameSite=Lax

1. Upload the customer-cloud-gallery folder to /wp-content/plugins/ or install via Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin.
2. Activate the plugin.
3. Go to Customer Cloud Gallery → Settings and connect Google Drive or Dropbox (step-by-step OAuth wizard included).
4. Create your first gallery under Customer Cloud Gallery → Add New.
5. Add the gallery to a page: insert the Cloud Gallery block or the Elementor widget and pick the gallery from the list — or paste the shortcode from the gallery editor (e.g. [ccgal_gallery id="42"]).
6. Set a page password under Page → Visibility → Password protected to restrict access.

Minimum Requirements

• WordPress 6.2 or higher
• PHP 7.4 or higher (8.1+ recommended)
• PHP extensions: openssl, gd or imagick
• Google Drive API credentials or a Dropbox app (free developer accounts work)

1.16.1

• Fixed: the "Pay now via PayPal" button in the order confirmation email now works when a PayPal email address is set in the print shop settings (not only a PayPal.Me name), and it passes the shop currency.
• Fixed: toolbar buttons that should be hidden ("Load more", "Download favorites", "Download selection", "Clear selection") stayed visible without any function.
• 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 no longer leaves 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.

1.16.0

• New (Pro): layouts. Besides the justified rows, a gallery can now use a masonry grid, a square grid or a filmstrip that scrolls sideways — plus spacing between the images (0 px for a seamless mosaic) and a corner radius, all per gallery in the editor.
• New (Pro): hover effect (zoom, darken or none), file-name captions on hover or always, and a light or dark lightbox with an optional thumbnail strip for quick navigation — per gallery in the editor.
• New (Pro): watermark. Put 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.
• New (Pro): chapters. Turn it on in the gallery editor and every subfolder of the gallery folder becomes its own section with a heading — "Getting ready", "Ceremony", "Party" — with a jump navigation above the grid. Photos in the folder itself come first; a leading number in a folder name ("01 …") sets the order and is not shown. Favorites, the lightbox and downloads work across all chapters, and "Download all" keeps the chapters as folders inside the ZIP.
• New (Pro): the watch folder can now create a page for every new gallery as well — a copy of a template page of your choice, with its Cloud Gallery block, Elementor widget or shortcode pointed at the new gallery. Title and status follow the gallery (draft or published). The template's password is deliberately not copied, so each client gets their own.
• Fixed: single-image downloads pause while a ZIP download is running, with a short note — instead of silently breaking the running archive.
• Fixed: no more "textdomain loaded too early" notice in the debug log after activating the plugin. The folder-watch cron schedule is now registered on init, and the print-order page is created on the first request after activation instead of inside the activation hook.
• Fixed: after activation, the welcome redirect landed on the gallery list instead of the settings page (HTML-escaped redirect URL).

1.15.2

• 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.
• New: a one-time pointer in the gallery list and in the gallery editor points at that box, so the block and the Elementor 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.

1.15.1

• 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 in 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.

1.15.0

• New (Free): "Cloud Gallery" block for the block editor. Pick a gallery from a list; the editor shows a preview card with the first images, the page shows the full gallery. Wide and full alignment supported.
• New (Free): Elementor widget "Cloud Gallery" with loading-mode and image-size overrides. Galleries initialise inside the Elementor editor preview.
• New (Pro): create galleries from the editor. In the block and in the Elementor widget, choose a subfolder of your main folder and the gallery is created on the spot (title taken from the folder name, editable). An existing gallery for that folder is reused.
• New (Pro): title image. Each gallery can show a cover photo above the grid — from the gallery folder or the media library — with the gallery title and a subtitle on it, adjustable height and image focus, a soft gradient or darkened overlay, at content width or edge to edge.
• New: after the update, a one-time "What's new" note on the plugin's own admin pages lists the new features with a link to the documentation.
• The gallery editor's shortcode box now also points to the block and the Elementor widget.
• New (Free): folder picker. Set a main folder once under Settings → "Main folder", then choose each gallery's cloud folder from a dropdown in the gallery editor — no more copying folder URLs or typing paths. Works for Google Drive and Dropbox.
• New (Pro): automatic galleries ("watch folder"). The plugin watches your main folder and creates a gallery for every new subfolder — title taken from the folder name, settings copied from a template gallery of your choice, created as draft (or published directly); a notice in the gallery list tells you what was created. Existing folders are only registered when you enable the feature, so nothing is created retroactively. Includes a "Scan now" button; opening the gallery list also triggers a check.
• The new subfolder listing endpoint requires the manage-options capability (like the existing folder check), keeping private cloud folder names restricted to administrators.
• New (Free): "Test connection" button on the settings page for each connected provider. It checks the whole chain step by step — access token, folder listing, a real image download and the thumbnail cache folder — and gives a plain-language hint for anything that fails (e.g. a Dropbox app missing the files.content.read permission, or "App folder" access instead of "Full Dropbox").
• New: Pro features are now shown greyed out with a "PRO" badge where they would live (print orders and visitor statistics in the gallery editor, automatic galleries in the settings), so it is clear what the upgrade adds. The free plugin is unchanged.
• New: after two weeks of use with at least one published gallery, a small, dismissible note on the plugin's own admin pages asks for a WordPress.org review — with "Maybe later" (30-day snooze) and "Don't ask again", remembered per user.
• Freemius SDK updated to 2.13.4 (configurable API timeout, PHP deprecation fixes).
• Fixed: ZIP download filenames no longer contain HTML entities when the gallery title has an apostrophe or special characters (e.g. "It’s_a_Madhouse.zip" is now "It's_a_Madhouse.zip").

1.13.5

• Fixed: ZIP downloads finally open correctly in macOS Archive Utility. Root cause found by analysing an affected customer's actual ZIP file: the archive's end-of-file record declared the table of contents as 0 bytes long, so macOS found "no readable items" while more tolerant tools opened the same file fine. The size was read from a memory buffer after it had already been handed off to the download stream. Affected every streaming bulk download since 1.13.2, regardless of gallery size. Huge thanks to Chris Tess for the persistent testing that made this diagnosis possible.
• Fixed: the server-side ZIP fallback (used for very large galleries when the browser download path is unavailable) now also writes each entry's size and checksum before the data, making its archives readable by strict sequential extractors, and no longer declares ZIP64 for ordinary entries. Failed files are skipped cleanly instead of leaving a broken entry in the archive.

1.13.4

• Fixed: ZIP downloads still could not be opened with the built-in Archive Utility on macOS ("the archive is empty or contains no readable items"), even after the fix in 1.13.3 — there were two separate causes and only the first one was addressed. 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 entry is now stored as a regular file with normal read permissions. Applies to all bulk downloads (all images, selection, favorites).

1.13.3

• Fixed: ZIP downloads could not be opened with the built-in Archive Utility on macOS, which reported the archive as empty, while other tools (e.g. The Unarchiver) opened the same file correctly. Each entry's size and checksum are now written directly into its local header instead of being appended after the data, so extractors that read the archive sequentially can open it. Affects all bulk downloads (all images, selection, favorites). Thanks to Chris Tess for the detailed report.

1.13.2

• Bulk download: downloading a whole gallery (or a selection) now saves a regular ZIP file straight to your Downloads folder in every modern browser — no more folder-permission prompt in Chrome/Edge. The streaming download path (no memory limit, works for multi-GB galleries) was previously disabled by an overly strict internal check and never actually ran; Firefox and Safari were silently limited to in-memory ZIPs (max ~1.8 GB, iOS 500 MB) or the slow server fallback. The folder-picker mode remains available as an automatic fallback.

1.13.1

• Bulk download (all / selection / favorites): a ZIP is no longer presented as "done" when files failed to download. If nothing could be retrieved the download is cancelled with a clear error instead of saving an empty ZIP, and partial results now report exactly how many of how many files are missing.
• Bulk download: permanent errors (e.g. an expired security token) no longer cause three slow retries per file, so a broken download fails fast instead of slowly producing an empty archive. Added flow-control to the streaming-ZIP service worker to keep memory bounded on very large (multi-GB) downloads.
• Security: the admin image/video preview endpoints and the folder-validation endpoint now require the "manage options" capability (previously "edit posts"), so lower-privileged users cannot probe the connected Drive/Dropbox account. Raw storage-provider error messages are no longer echoed to the browser (they are logged when WP_DEBUG is enabled).
• Drive/Dropbox: a single visitor can no longer trigger repeated full folder re-listings by probing random file IDs (folder refresh is now rate-limited), protecting your cloud API quota; and a temporary API error no longer hides a real image for several minutes.
• ZIP archives now carry the UTF-8 filename flag, so names with umlauts or accents (e.g. "Müller_001.jpg") extract correctly in Windows Explorer.
• Privacy / GDPR: personal-data export and erasure for print orders now depend on whether order data exists, not on the Pro licence state, so a downgraded site still fulfils data requests. The uninstaller now also removes the Pro statistics tables.
• Performance (Pro): the statistics tables are no longer re-checked with dbDelta on every request, and a new composite index speeds up view de-duplication.
• Frontend fixes: marking a favorite no longer flips the heart on a failed request; the lightbox no longer re-opens after being closed mid-load; the "show all favorites" view no longer retries endlessly on a network error; the images-per-batch setting is clamped to a sane range; the "Clear cache" button now also clears the cached folder listings.
• Pro admin fixes: the inline statistics toggle no longer shows a green "saved" tick when the server rejected the change (e.g. with cookies disabled); the order-status dropdown reverts and warns if saving fails; paper-price-list rows no longer overwrite each other after a row is deleted; renaming a price-list key no longer silently detaches it from the formats that use it.
• Additional stability fixes: stable visitor-table ordering, defensive guards on Dropbox API responses, and folder validation no longer overwriting text while you are still typing.
• Image cache: thumbnails and previews are now downloaded to a temporary file first and moved into the cache atomically (both the direct-thumbnail and the resize fallback path). Previously a PHP process killed mid-download (timeout, traffic spike) could leave an empty or truncated image behind that was then served forever; such stale entries now heal themselves on the next request, and transfers that deliver fewer bytes than announced are detected and discarded.
• Statistics (Pro): top-list entries whose file no longer exists in the connected cloud folder are labelled "No longer in the cloud folder" instead of opening an empty tab.

1.13.0

• Security hardening: unpublished galleries (draft, private, pending, trashed) can no longer leak original files. The publish-status guard now covers the single-file, ZIP and manifest download endpoints as well as the batch, favorite, order and print-format REST routes. Logged-in editors with access to the gallery are unaffected.
• Performance: per-gallery statistics are now memoized per request, cutting redundant database queries on the gallery list and detail pages; the cloud folder listing is cached in a short-lived transient so concurrent visitors and infinite-scroll requests collapse to a single Drive/Dropbox API call per page instead of one call per view.
• Dropbox galleries now honour the gallery's sort order and "images per page" setting: the Dropbox folder listing is sorted (natural name, name, or date — ascending/descending) and paginated consistently, so the grid order and the ZIP order match. This brings Dropbox in line with the existing Google Drive behaviour.
• The bundled German (de_DE) translation loads again on self-hosted and Pro installations (the textdomain loader was restored on the init hook). Sites served a translation through WordPress.org language packs are unaffected; the language pack still takes precedence when present.
• Fixes: Dropbox statistics detail-page thumbnails and full-size links now resolve correctly; the statistics fetch limit was raised from 30 to 50 with an honest item-count badge.
• Pro statistics detail page UX refactor: the per-gallery statistics page is now collapsible and scales cleanly to galleries with thousands of images. Each of the four top-lists (Top Favorites, Top Viewed, Top Downloaded — single, Top Downloaded — selection) is wrapped in a native HTML5 <details> element with the item count visible in the header even when collapsed. Each section has a per-section limit dropdown (5/10/25/50/All, default 10). The visitor activity table now uses true pagination (25 per page default) so that galleries with hundreds of visitors no longer produce a 10,000-pixel-long scroll page.
• Pro inline toggles in the gallery list (WP-Admin → Customer Cloud Gallery → All galleries): two new checkbox columns let you flip a gallery's Statistics-tracking and Print-shop on or off without entering the gallery editor. Each checkbox saves via its own per-gallery-scoped AJAX endpoint with nonce + capability check; optimistic UI feedback, server-authoritative state correction, screen-reader friendly (each checkbox has an aria-label naming the gallery; the disabled-reason for Stats when cookies are off is reachable by keyboard). The Stats toggle correctly mirrors the existing master-cookies dependency — when cookies are off for a gallery, the Stats sub-switch is locked off too.
• Pro stats "unique_visitors" consistency fix carried over from the 1.12.2 hotfix: the top-card counter now counts distinct cookies across all activity tables (views ∪ favorites ∪ downloads), matching the "Besucheraktivität" table below.
• Pro stats deletion fix carried over from the 1.12.2 hotfix: "Reset tracking data" and per-visitor "Daten löschen" now also clear favorites in addition to views and downloads.

1.12.2

• wp.org Plugin Directory review compliance (round 3):
• cURL → WordPress HTTP API: the four remaining cURL call sites in includes/class-dropbox-adapter.php (download_to_file, stream_to_output, download_thumbnail) and includes/class-google-drive-adapter.php (stream_to_output) have been fully ported to wp_remote_request() / wp_remote_get() with stream => true. File downloads write directly to disk via the WordPress HTTP API (no PHP memory buffering); the streaming-to-browser cases stream the response body to a WordPress temp file via wp_tempnam() and then echo it back in 64 KB chunks, with HTTP 206 Range support preserved by forwarding the Range header. The Dropbox content-type issue is solved by sending Content-Type: application/octet-stream, which Dropbox accepts on /files/download and /files/get_thumbnail_v2. The plugin no longer contains a single curl_*() or CURLOPT_* reference in its own code; only the Freemius licensing SDK in vendor/ still uses cURL, which the Plugin Review Team's guidelines explicitly permit for third-party vendor libraries.
• Plugin Assets handbook compliance: verified that no banner-*.{png,jpg}, icon-*.{png,jpg,svg}, screenshot-*.{png,jpg}, blueprints/ or header.png files exist in the plugin ZIP, and that all plugin-resource references use the dynamic functions plugins_url() / plugin_dir_path() / plugin_dir_url() (via the CCGAL_URL / CCGAL_DIR constants) rather than hardcoded /wp-content/plugins/... paths. Listing assets (banner, icon, screenshots) are prepared in the source repository under .wordpress-org/ for deployment to the SVN /assets/ root after approval — they are deliberately excluded from the plugin ZIP per the Plugin Assets handbook.
• Video files in cloud folders are temporarily excluded from gallery listings (image files only). The in-browser video player and the related streaming endpoint are not exercised by visitors in 1.12.2. Video support will be re-introduced in a later release; existing video files in connected Drive/Dropbox folders are not touched, only hidden from the gallery output.
• Pro statistics tracking improvements:
• The JS-level state.viewedInLightbox Set in assets/js/gallery.js is now cleared when the lightbox closes, so a visitor who closes the lightbox and reopens the same image is counted as a new engagement (the server-side 10-minute dedup window still applies on top of this — see below).
• $wpdb->insert() calls in record_view, record_image_view and record_download now log to error_log() if the insert fails (gated on WP_DEBUG), so future silent-skip failures are observable instead of being swallowed by a 200 OK response.
• Server-side dedup windows are unchanged: 1 hour per (gallery, visitor) for page-loads, 10 minutes per (gallery, file, visitor) for lightbox image-opens. These are appropriate for both client-delivery galleries and public-page galleries (suppresses bot crawl + reload-spam without losing legitimate re-engagement).
• Pro stats deletion fix (includes/class-dashboard__premium_only.php): the "Reset tracking data" button on the gallery detail page AND the per-visitor "Daten löschen" button now correctly delete favorites in addition to views and downloads. Previously the favorites table was untouched, so the UI promise ("Deletes all favorites, downloads and views") was not honoured and the per-visitor delete looked like a no-op when the visitor had only favorited images and no other activity.
• Pro stats "Eindeutige Besucher" consistency fix (includes/class-tracking__premium_only.php::get_gallery_stats): the top-card counter now counts distinct cookies across ALL activity tables (views ∪ favorites ∪ downloads), not just page-load views. Previously the counter only saw visitors who had a file_id IS NULL row, so visitors whose page-load was suppressed by the 1-hour dedup window or who arrived via a full-page cache (no PHP execution) — and only triggered AJAX-based image-views or downloads — were invisible to the top counter even though they correctly appeared in the "Besucheraktivität" table below. Both numbers now agree.

1.12.1

• wp.org Plugin Directory review compliance (round 2):
• Statistics module fully extracted from the Free build. The tracking class, stats tables, the stats sub-switch UI, the views/downloads admin columns, the view/image-view REST endpoints and all download-recording call sites have been removed from the Free codebase and consolidated into a single Pro-only file (class-tracking__premium_only.php). Free has zero stats footprint on disk; Pro hooks into the Free build via generic action/filter names (e.g. ccgal_download_completed, ccgal_gallery_deleted, ccgal_uninstall_tables) so the Free code stays decoupled.
• Frontend JS Stats-Reste removed: the previous recordView()/recordImageView() functions and the trackBulkComplete() beacon are gone. The Free gallery.js now only dispatches generic ccgal:gallery-opened / ccgal:image-opened CustomEvents; the bulk-download helper calls a renamed notifyBulkCompleted ping to a ccgal_notify_bulk_complete AJAX endpoint. None of those reach a database table in Free.
• Prefix refactor: every declared name (constants, classes, functions, hook names, option keys, post-meta keys, table names, AJAX/admin-post action slugs, CSS classes, custom properties, JS globals, script/style handles, REST namespace, custom HTTP header, cache directory and the gallery post-type slug) has been renamed to the 5-character ccgal_/CCGAL_/ccgal- prefix to comply with the wp.org "prefix must be over 4 characters" rule. The browser visitor cookie keeps its legacy name wpg_visitor so existing visitor favourites remain attached after the migration — the only intentional exception.
• Database migration: an idempotent activation-time routine renames all WP options, post-meta keys, the gallery post type, the custom tables (favorites, orders, order_items + Pro: views, downloads), the leading-underscore _system_page meta marker, the daily cron event and the thumbnail cache directory. The routine excludes its own version-marker option from the bulk rename (so the guard can still be read on a re-activation if anything below crashes), extends set_time_limit(300) for large postmeta tables, and writes a transient admin notice if a RENAME TABLE fails (e.g. missing ALTER permission on shared hosting). Shortcodes in existing post_content are rewritten in place ([ccg_gallery], [hochzeitsgalerie], [customer_cloud_gallery] → [ccgal_gallery]; same for the print variant). The migration guards against re-runs via the legacy/new db-version markers.
• Security: the public AJAX endpoints ccgal_serve_image and ccgal_stream_video now require a gallery-scoped nonce (ccgal_gallery_<id>) issued by the gallery renderer, in addition to the existing file-in-folder check. Draft / private / trashed galleries are rejected on the public branch unless the caller has edit_post capability. $_SERVER['HTTP_RANGE'] is now unslashed and length-capped before the strict preg_match validator. $_COOKIE['wpg_visitor'] is now sanitized through a hex-only whitelist matching the generator. $_REQUEST['gallery'], $_REQUEST['count'] and the array-branch of $_REQUEST['files'] are now consistently wp_unslash()-ed before further sanitization. json_decode() of the _REQUEST['files'] payload runs with depth=4 so a JSON bomb cannot DoS the file-IDs parser.
• The Plugin URI header has been removed from the main plugin file because the SSL certificate for the linked domain is not yet provisioned. The Author URI is unaffected.

1.12.0

• Faster bulk-download for the "Download all images" button. The button now picks the best path automatically: (1) in browsers with the File System Access API (Chrome/Edge/Opera) the visitor picks a target folder and the photos are written there directly, fetched in parallel (6 connections); (2) on Firefox/Safari/HTTPS sites a service-worker-backed streaming ZIP is built in the browser — no RAM limit, multi-GB galleries work without buffering; (3) small galleries can fall back to a single in-memory ZIP blob; (4) the existing server-streaming ZIP remains as the last-resort fallback. Across realistic gallery sizes this typically reduces wait time by 4–6× on the parallel paths because the server is no longer the single-threaded bottleneck. The hard listing limit per gallery raised from 5,000 to 25,000 files. New endpoint ccgal_download_manifest exposes the gallery's file list (JSON: id/name/size) under the same gallery-scoped nonce; a separate completion endpoint (renamed to ccgal_notify_bulk_complete in 1.12.1) fires a single ccgal_download_completed action when the client-side ZIP is finished, so extension modules can react without per-file inserts. New assets/js/sw-zip.js service worker is registered on demand from the gallery scope and only activated when the bulk-download button is used. Manifests are cached as 60-second transients per gallery to protect Drive/Dropbox API quota against repeated clicks. The legacy ccgal_download_zip endpoint is unchanged.
• Selection ZIP download moved from Pro back to Free — visitors of any gallery can now pick specific images and download them as a single ZIP without a Pro licence.
• Code structure: Pro-only PHP files renamed with the __premium_only.php suffix so the Free build no longer ships any Pro implementation code. Inline <script> blocks moved out of PHP into proper enqueued asset files for better caching and CSP compatibility.
• Shortcode refactor for wp.org review compliance: the deprecated customer_cloud_gallery and customer_cloud_gallery_print shortcodes have been removed. The new prefixed shortcodes [ccgal_gallery] and [ccgal_print] are now the only supported names. Existing pages are automatically migrated on plugin update — the post content is rewritten in place once, so no user action is required.

1.11.8

• Phases 1 + 2 of Plugin Check sweep for wp.org compliance: replaced unlink() with wp_delete_file() in cache, adapters and uninstaller; switched DOS-timestamp generation in the ZIP streamer from date() to gmdate() to avoid runtime-timezone side effects; added missing translators: comments on plural and placeholder strings in dashboard and orders admin; reordered placeholder example text to use positional %1$s/%2$s syntax; rewrote printf( esc_html__( "…#%d" ), $id ) patterns in email templates and admin notices as echo esc_html( sprintf( __( "…" ), $id ) ) so the placeholder substitution is itself escaped.
• Phase 3 of the Plugin Check sweep: annotated three SQL false-positives where the static analyzer cannot follow $wpdb->prepare() results across an assignment (visitor-stats aggregation in class-tracking.php and the orders CSV-export query in class-orders.php). The CSV-export ternary was also split into a clean if/else so each branch can carry its own technical justification; behaviour is unchanged.
• Phase 4 (filesystem operations): annotated php://output streams in CSV export handlers (class-orders.php, class-dashboard.php) and best-effort cache hygiene calls (@touch, @rename in class-cache.php). The Dropbox adapter's paired fopen/fclose around cURL CURLOPT_FILE are documented inline since cURL requires a real PHP file pointer. Uninstaller rmdir() calls were already annotated in 1.11.6.
• Phase 5 (cURL → WP HTTP API): migrated class-google-drive-adapter.php::get_media_download_url to wp_remote_head() (HEAD with redirection => 0 to read the Location header). All remaining cURL calls — Drive stream_to_output, Dropbox download_to_file / stream_to_output / download_thumbnail — are kept and annotated with technical reasons: WP HTTP API has no streaming-write callback (CURLOPT_WRITEFUNCTION) and Dropbox content endpoints require an empty Content-Type header that wp_remote_post() cannot send. Migrating these to WP HTTP API would have forced double I/O via temp files for every gallery download.
• Phase 6 (Plugin Check warnings): added file-level phpcs:disable blocks with technical justifications across class-tracking.php, class-orders.php, class-print-settings.php, class-rest-api.php, class-admin.php, class-downloads.php, class-print-page.php, class-google-oauth.php, class-dropbox-oauth.php. Direct database queries on plugin-owned custom tables (wp_ccgal_orders, wp_ccgal_order_items, wp_ccgal_views, wp_ccgal_favorites, wp_ccgal_downloads) are by design — they are not cached because they are written and read inside the same request lifecycle. Nonce-verification suppressions on read-only listing/sort/filter parameters are paired with concrete justifications. OAuth callbacks use the OAuth state parameter instead of WordPress nonces (a session-bound nonce cannot survive a redirect through Google/Dropbox). Outbound wp_redirect() calls (OAuth auth endpoint, signed Drive media URLs) are kept because wp_safe_redirect() would block external hosts. Added missing wp_unslash() calls on $_COOKIE['ccgal_visitor'] and $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] in class-tracking.php and class-print-rest.php.
• Code review follow-ups (small but real fixes surfaced while preparing the wp.org submission):
• Visitor-IP hashing (class-tracking.php::ip_hash, class-print-rest.php::get_visitor_id) now uses filter_var( …, FILTER_VALIDATE_IP ) instead of sanitize_text_field — sanitize_text_field strips %xx sequences and would mangle IPv6 zone-id syntax (e.g. fe80::1%eth0).
• class-google-drive-adapter.php::get_media_download_url now handles the case where wp_remote_retrieve_header() returns an array of duplicate Location headers (rare but possible behind some CDN layers); previously the array would be cast to the literal string "Array" and the call would falsely return ccgal_bad_location.
• REST media-cache redirects in class-rest-api.php::serve_image now use wp_safe_redirect() instead of wp_redirect() — the targets are same-origin cache URLs, so the safer redirect is appropriate.
• PayPal checkout improvements (surfaced during pre-submission smoke testing):
• PayPal.Me URL now appends the configured currency code (e.g. paypal.me/USERNAME/25.00EUR). Previously the link omitted the currency, so PayPal would default to the receiver's account currency (often USD for new accounts), forcing customers to pay in the wrong currency.
• Order-confirmation screen now shows a PayPal-specific memo hint instead of the generic SEPA "Verwendungszweck" string: "Important: PayPal does not transfer order numbers automatically. On the PayPal page, please enter #1234 in the note/memo field so we can match your payment to your order." PayPal.Me cannot pass an order reference programmatically, so the manual hint is the correct workaround for the free-tier shop.
• The PayPal payment-method radio button label changed from "PayPal (paypal.me)" to simply "PayPal" since the field now also supports email-based PayPal Standard payments (not just paypal.me). Existing text-overrides for the old "PayPal (paypal.me)" string become orphaned and need to be re-set against the new "PayPal" msgid if a custom label was configured.
• PayPal payment target field now accepts BOTH a PayPal.Me username AND a PayPal email address. The form auto-detects which mode applies on submit: an "@" in the value switches to PayPal Standard "Buy Now" (_xclick), which works with any PayPal account and additionally passes the order number to PayPal as the item description — the seller sees "Order #1234" directly in the PayPal payment record, no manual memo required. Without "@" the form continues to use PayPal.Me as before. The previous email warning has been replaced by a green "Email mode active" notice in Settings.
• Removed the redundant "PayPal label in form" and "Bank-transfer label in form" custom-text settings. They duplicated functionality provided by the dedicated Text Overrides system (Settings → Text overrides) and could be misconfigured by accidentally entering an email address as the button label, which would then appear as the visible payment-method label in the checkout (e.g. "tes@er.com" instead of "PayPal"). The two payment buttons now always render with the standard, translatable defaults ("PayPal (paypal.me)" / "Bank transfer (advance payment)"); existing stored values are ignored, and the existing Text Overrides UI can still customize the labels via the i18n string-replacement path.
• Fix: text-override fields could not be cleared once a value had been entered. Previously the JS auto-filled the default text whenever the field became empty, which created an infinite loop — every Backspace immediately re-inserted the default. The placeholder attribute already shows the default visually, so the auto-fill is unnecessary and has been removed; clearing a field now simply clears the override on save.
• UX: Drive and Dropbox step-by-step setup guides (the collapsed accordions on the first-run welcome panel) are now also available directly in the Settings page provider sections, so a returning user who connects a second cloud later can follow the same guide without having to dig through the README. The two guides are extracted into reusable methods (CCGAL_Welcome::render_drive_setup_guide(), render_dropbox_setup_guide()) and emit byte-identical translatable strings.
• Otherwise, the 1.11.8 release contains only static-analysis / annotation changes required by wp.org's Plugin Check; runtime behaviour is unchanged for the common (IPv4, single-Location-header, same-origin-cache) path.

1.11.7

• Fix: first-run welcome redirect could fail with "Sorry, you are not allowed to access this page." on some hosts (especially staging environments) because the Settings submenu was not yet registered when the redirect was issued. The redirect now hooks on admin_menu priority 9999 and resolves the URL via menu_page_url(), with a graceful fallback to the gallery list page.
• Fix: Quick-Start panel no longer auto-expands the Drive/Dropbox setup guides — both accordions are now collapsed by default for a cleaner first impression. Open whichever provider you want to set up.
• Docs: Drive setup guide now explains Google's "This app isn't verified" warning that appears the first time you authorize — clarifies that this is expected for self-hosted OAuth apps and tells you which buttons to click ("Advanced" → "Go to [app] (unsafe)") to proceed.
• Docs: Drive setup guide now also instructs to click "Publish App" on the OAuth consent screen to move the app from Testing to In production — otherwise Google invalidates the refresh token after 7 days of inactivity and the gallery silently disconnects.

1.11.6

• New: GDPR / WP Privacy API integration — registered personal-data exporter and eraser hooks (Tools → Export/Erase Personal Data) for print-order data; suggested privacy policy paragraph contributed to Tools → Privacy editor.
• Compliance: print-order page is no longer auto-created on Free installs (the page would have rendered an unregistered shortcode). It is created on first Pro activation or on the first Pro page load after a Free→Pro upgrade, and uses the modern print shortcode.
• i18n: registered wp_set_script_translations() for the ccgal-gallery, ccgal-admin and ccgal-print scripts so JS strings can be translated through the standard language-pack system.
• Performance: large/admin-only options (ccgal_print_formats, ccgal_paper_price_lists, OAuth tokens, payment/email settings, etc.) are now stored with autoload=false to avoid loading them on every page request site-wide.
• Performance: daily cache-cleanup cron is now scheduled once at activation instead of being re-checked via wp_next_scheduled() on every page load.
• Plugin Check: class-orders.php order list query refactored to use %i placeholder for the column identifier and a strict literal toggle for ASC/DESC, with documented phpcs:ignore on the few remaining intentional interpolations.
• Plugin Check: class-text-overrides.php translate() call uses a literal text-domain and documented phpcs:ignore on the dynamic msgid lookup (the override mechanism is dynamic by design).
• Docs: corrected the Privacy Policy section in readme.txt — the visitor cookie value is a random identifier stored as-is, and it is the IP address that is stored as a salted SHA-256 hash (not the cookie ID).

1.11.5

• New: first-run welcome flow — after activation the plugin redirects once to its Settings page and shows a 2-step Quick-Start panel: (1) connect Google Drive or Dropbox, (2) create your first gallery. Auto-checks each step and disappears once both are done.
• New: inline step-by-step guides for obtaining Google Drive and Dropbox API credentials are embedded in the Quick-Start panel — including the exact OAuth redirect URI to paste into each provider's developer console.
• Hardening: replaced printf( esc_html__( ... ), '<a ...>...' ) patterns with wp_kses( sprintf( __( ... ), ... ), $allowed ) so format-string output is correctly escaped while link tags are explicitly whitelisted.
• Hardening: bulk-action redirects in the orders list now use wp_safe_redirect() instead of wp_redirect().
• Hardening: order-status nonce now uses a fixed action name and is verified before reading $_POST['order_id'].
• Hardening: external OAuth redirect URLs (Google, Dropbox) wrapped in esc_url_raw() for defence-in-depth.
• Compliance: removed redundant Author URI from the plugin header (matched Plugin URI, which the WordPress.org review process disallows).

1.11.4

• Fix: gallery toolbar buttons (e.g. "Show only favorites") kept the active theme color after a click because some themes style button:focus globally — now reset via :focus:not(:focus-visible) so the base appearance is restored on mouse-click; keyboard focus styling unchanged
• Fix: same focus-leak resolved for lightbox close/prev/next and lightbox favorite/download buttons
• Compliance: removed uninstall.php and moved the cleanup logic into the Freemius after_uninstall hook (CCGAL_Uninstaller::cleanup) — required by Freemius deployment policy

1.11.3

• Fix: Statistics submenu was missing in Pro mode — gallery quick-stats detail link now opens the dashboard instead of showing a permission error
• Fix: Print-shop checkbox in the gallery editor showed "enabled" by default for new galleries while the actual setting was off — display now matches stored value
• Fix: Print options menu used different slugs in Free vs Pro — unified to ccgal-print-options so bookmarks survive Free→Pro upgrade
• Compat: additional shortcode aliases added for the gallery and print shortcodes so existing user pages keep working unchanged (these aliases were later removed in 1.12.0 with an automatic post-content migration)
• Cleanup: removed stray reference to a third-party AI vendor in the FAQ wording
• Cleanup: switched one stray wp_redirect() to wp_safe_redirect() for consistency
• Cleanup: registered the ccgal_allow_print post-meta with WordPress for proper authorization handling
• i18n: text-domain migrated from wp-galerie to customer-cloud-gallery (matches new wp.org plugin slug)

1.11.2

• (Note: the Pro-feature upgrade prompts, locked menus, and visible-but-disabled stats sub-switch introduced in 1.11.2 were all removed again in 1.12.0 and 1.12.1 to comply with the wp.org "fully functional" rule. The Free build no longer ships any Pro-only UI, locked menus or disabled controls.)
• Fix: button labels displayed in wrong case (Title Case) on themes using text-transform: capitalize — resolved with text-transform: none on .ccgal-btn
• Fix: default label for selection download shortened to "Order selection"
• i18n: 19 new strings; DE translation updated (542 translated strings)

1.11.1

• Statistics sub-menu moved to correct position in admin sidebar
• Selection ZIP download removed from Free tier
• Cookie consent notice updated for GDPR compliance

1.11.0

• Dropbox integration: full OAuth flow, folder browser, thumbnail streaming
• Storage adapter architecture: Google Drive and Dropbox behind a unified interface
• Design customisation: accent colour, hover colour, border colour
• Text overrides: rename every label and button text in the frontend
• Print shop: paper options with per-format price lists
• Print shop: configurable legal checkboxes (age confirmation, terms acceptance)
• Print shop: shipping cost with free-shipping threshold
• Print shop: order management with status tracking (New → Confirmed → Shipped)
• i18n groundwork: all strings translatable, DE translation included

1.0.0

• Initial release: Google Drive galleries, lazy-loading, lightbox, favourites, ZIP download, visitor statistics, e-mail print shop