Sunshine Photo Cart 3.7 is now available, along with updates to nine add-ons. Most of my time on this one went into speed, and if you've built up a lot of galleries over the years I think you'll notice the difference the moment you update.
Faster galleries
If your galleries page has felt slower every year, this is the release that fixes it.
Galleries pile up faster than most photographers expect. You add one per class, or per team, or per session, and after a few years there are far more of them sitting in your database than you'd guess from looking at your site. Sunshine was doing a lot more work than it needed to every time that page loaded, and past a certain size some sites couldn't finish loading it at all.
I've reworked how galleries get pulled together, and the improvement scales with how big your site is. A few dozen galleries and you'll see a modest gain, but on the largest sites I tested against, pages that used to crawl now come back right away. Searching inside a gallery got the same treatment, so deep sets of sub-galleries return results quickly too.
A lighter site overall
The second speed change reaches every visitor, even the ones who never open a gallery.
Sunshine now stays out of the way on pages that have nothing to do with selling photos, so your blog posts, your about page and your contact form all do less work than they used to. It's also stopped leaving a cookie on visitors who don't need one, which matters more than it sounds like it should. Caching plugins and host level caching skip any page carrying a cookie, since they assume it's personal to that visitor, so without one those pages can be served from cache again. If you run a caching plugin and it never seemed to help much, that's very likely why.
Faster downloads
Client downloads start almost immediately now and finish in seconds, even for a big gallery kept in cloud storage. The gain is largest if your photos live in S3, Wasabi, Backblaze B2, R2 or something similar, where a 100 photo gallery went from about half a minute down to under three seconds in my testing.
They also work at any size, so however many photos your client bought, the download runs start to finish. Sunshine now tells the browser how big the file is before it starts, which means your client can see how far along it is instead of staring at nothing and wondering. That last part sounds cosmetic, but it's the difference between a client who waits and a client who emails you asking whether it worked. Zip files open cleanly on iPhone and iPad, and any download size you've set to be watermarked arrives watermarked.
A simpler billing address at checkout
The checkout flow has been tidied up a little around the billing address, both under the hood and for your clients. It now has its own step, and only appears when it's actually needed.
On orders that ship, your client gets a "use shipping address as billing address" box that's already ticked, so there's nothing extra for them to fill in unless the two actually differ.
Tax is now worked out from where the order changes hands: shipped orders use the shipping address, orders collected in person use your store address, and downloads use the billing address. Square also gets the full buyer details it needs to verify cards, which matters most for European cards.
Add-on updates
Nine add-ons went out alongside core.
Digital Downloads 3.3.0 carries all of the download speed work above, and it handles a couple of situations that used to trip it up: galleries where photos have a matching video or raw file saved beside them, and galleries where two photos share a file name.
Automated Email Marketing 3.2 adds a proper unsubscribe system, and it's the one I'd update today if you send marketing email. Every automated email includes an unsubscribe link, and Gmail and Yahoo show their own one-click unsubscribe button, which both providers now expect and which affects whether your email reaches the inbox at all. Unsubscribed clients are skipped automatically, and you can see and reverse someone's status from their customer profile.
Video Sales 3.0.3 and Packages 3.1.9 work together so video downloads can be sold as part of a package. You'll need both updates for that one.
Cloud Storage 3.1.3 migrates cleanly from WP Offload Media when your files live somewhere other than Amazon, such as Wasabi, Backblaze B2 or Cloudflare R2. There's a new Re-Run Migration button in Tools for tidying up image addresses whenever you need to.
Bulk Galleries 3.2.7 picks up an interrupted import where it left off, with a Retry button ready when you want it along with some data fixes.
Advanced Shipping 3.0.10 keeps pickup locations available to every client wherever they are. Gift Cards 3.0.6 records redemptions in the order activity log, so you can see what was applied to an order and what's left on the card. Discounts 3.1.8 has a small admin improvement.
Translations
All 19 translations were rebuilt for this release, and every one of them is complete now.
They also ship in a newer format that WordPress 6.5 and above can load much faster than the old one. If you run your site in a language other than English, that's another small speed gain on every page, and it happens automatically once you update. The older format still ships too, so nothing breaks on older versions of WordPress.
If you spot something that reads oddly in your language, tell me and I'll get it corrected.
Update now
Update from your WordPress dashboard the usual way. If you have a lot of galleries, or you sell digital downloads, this is one worth doing today rather than getting to next month.
New to Sunshine? You can start with the free version and add what you need from there.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for using Sunshine.
