FotoGrids 1.1.0 is out. It is the first update since 1.0 went live, and most of it is repair work — the kind a first release earns.
One fix matters more than the rest, so it goes first.
The EXIF data was missing for big images, and here is why
WordPress makes a second copy of any photo above its big-image threshold, and it strips the metadata out when it makes that copy. FotoGrids was reading from that copy. Camera, lens, aperture, shutter, ISO — empty, for essentially every photo out of a modern camera. The XMP credit packet went with it.
Both now read from the original file WordPress preserves. If the capture data on your galleries looked blank and you could not work out why, that was this. The docs cover editing an item’s EXIF data, and there is a longer piece on the blog about when to show capture data and when to strip it.
Uploading a shoot is much faster
The gallery uploader now hands off to WordPress’ own media uploader. A batch goes up in parallel instead of one file at a time, your site’s own mime and file-size rules come with it, and a single file that fails no longer strands the rest of the batch behind it.
Two new places to look when something is wrong
Tools → System Info reports your WordPress, server, database and media environment alongside FotoGrids’ own state, ready to copy or download into a support ticket. A second tab lists PHP and browser errors raised by FotoGrids code, plus a read-only tail of the WordPress debug log. It turns “the gallery looks odd on my site” into something we can actually read.
The item editor has a new Media tab: every image size WordPress generated for that item, with a preview, dimensions, file size, where it came from, and a copy-URL action. Sizes that were never produced are flagged as Not generated, File missing, or Source too small, and link straight through to Regenerate Thumbnails. Most “why is this thumbnail blurry” questions end here — the rest are usually a matter of image sizes and cropping.
The admin reads better
The Permissions Manager has been rewritten to say what FotoGrids actually gates, in plain language. Tools are named rather than listed as capability slugs, and the twenty-six capabilities WordPress derives from the post types collapse into four readable rows per collection type. Role grants you already made are untouched — see gallery permissions for the whole picture.
Statistics now keeps the period you picked in the URL, so a reload or a link you send someone opens on the same view. “Recent Activity” is called “Recently Viewed”, which is what the table always showed. More of what it records sits on the engagement and analytics page.
The import and export log reads at a glance now, with coloured Export and Import pills and one chip per data type. The Debug Log panel always renders, reports WP_DEBUG and WP_DEBUG_LOG as status lights, and names each channel’s constant on its own row.
A News and Updates feed sits on the dashboard, with a What’s New panel in the header. Both can be turned off under Settings → Advanced.
Lighter, and current with WordPress
FotoGrids is verified against WordPress 7.1, including its client-side media processing. That work surfaced a bug of its own: watermark generation was running before any image sizes existed. It no longer does, and watermarking behaves the same on 7.1 as it did before.
The admin fonts are down from 748 KB to 241 KB — Poppins as woff2, with JetBrains Mono for the monospace surfaces, both served from your own site. The translation template now carries all 1,741 strings; it previously shipped empty, which made translating FotoGrids harder than it needed to be. Table names interpolated into direct SQL are prepared or quoted, and WordPress Plugin Check runs on every change before it lands.
And the smaller ones
The video embed modal no longer loses per-source drafts. The upgrade modal has a close button. Extra-small buttons render at the right height, the drag placeholder label sits centred, the Featured and Share Image metabox lines up, and untitled galleries no longer leave blank rows in the list. Three “Complete Your Setup” steps that could never be ticked now can, so the progress bar reaches the end. An Add-Ons link and an empty submenu for add-ons that do not exist are gone, along with a Freemius opt-in link that could put your usage-data choice out of step with Settings → Advanced.
The full list, grouped by what was added, improved and fixed, is on the changelog.
Still all in the free version
Everything above is in the free version, on WordPress 6.1 to 7.1 and PHP 7.4 and up. Update from your plugins screen and the new tools are where the list says they are.
The roadmap shows what we are working on next. If something in your galleries still looks wrong, Tools → System Info is the fastest way to tell us what your site is seeing.