I've shipped updates across the core plugin and four add-ons. Most of it is the quiet, important stuff — payments that finalize the way they should, galleries that load faster, and cloud storage jobs that no longer make you sit and watch a progress bar. Here's what changed and why it matters.
More reliable checkouts
The biggest focus was payment reliability, especially Square.
Once in a while a customer pays, then closes the tab a half-second too early — and the order gets stuck on "pending" even though the card was charged. Square now re-checks recent pending orders in the background and finalizes any that actually went through, on its own. There's also a new Reconcile Pending Square Orders tool under Sunshine → Tools, and a per-order "Recheck payment status in Square" action, so you can clear anything that ever looks stuck.
Re-entering a card after a failed attempt no longer throws a confusing duplicate-charge error, the checkout button now disables itself while a charge is processing, and failed refunds tell you the actual reason instead of failing silently. Stripe and PayPal got fixes too, for the rare cases where an order could be left pending or marked failed after a payment that really succeeded.
Faster galleries
Galleries with a lot of photos now load with far fewer database queries — the gallery no longer re-reads its entire photo list every time it needs to look something up, and orders with many items load their details in a single query instead of one per item.
The Lightbox add-on got the same treatment: instead of preparing every photo's purchase and download options up front, it now loads each photo's options the moment you open it. On a big gallery, that's a noticeably quicker page.
Built for libraries with tens of thousands of photos
If you shoot high volume — schools, sports, events, anywhere you're managing tens of thousands of images — storage is a real cost, and the Cloud Storage add-on is how you keep it in check. This update makes it work the way it should at that scale.
Migrating an existing library to the cloud and reclaiming local disk space now run in the background. Start the job, close the tab, go do something else — you'll get an email when it's done, whether you're offloading a few hundred photos or fifty thousand. Reclaim now confirms each cloud copy is present and the right size before it deletes the local file, so freeing up space stays safe even across a huge library. And the "Network Error" that used to stop a large migration before it even started is gone.
Paired with the query and lightbox speedups above, the goal is the same: Sunshine and its add-ons should stay fast and dependable whether you're running 50 galleries or 5,000.
Plus a round of smaller fixes
- Digital Downloads: the Downloads account page no longer collides with WooCommerce's built-in "downloads" page, a footer error is resolved, and cloud-stored downloads return the correct resized image.
- Core: the Quick Edit "Taxable" checkbox saves correctly, the per-image watermark checkbox shows its real state, and account pages no longer 404 after you change a slug.
- A security fix removed a few unused admin handlers that didn't properly check permissions.
Update now
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