Featured Community Plugin: Google Photos
This post is part of a series, featuring the incredible work of plugin authors who grow the TRMNL plugin ecosystem with every contribution. The TRMNL team has individually selected these plugins and authors to be featured.
Google Photos Plugin
Community member Hossain (Discord: hossaink) created the Google Photos plugin; here are their words on how it was created.
Why did you want this plugin to exist?
Photos are an excellent way to freeze memories at a point in life. I happen to create a lot of memories using my phone camera. Having multiple devices at home I wanted to showcase my precious memories in-between other playlist items to bring me back to those frozen moments! Making the Google Photos plugin allowed me to put these memories in any TRMNL I wanted, with ease.
How did you balance look vs function?
By design of the plugin you can't go wrong as it shows the precious moment of the user on their TRMNL device. The focus was to keep the feature simple and yet useful so that it does not distract or do too many things. That's why the customizable plugin title is there to allow users to add their personal touch, or surfacing year is there to take users back to an exact point in time of their memory timeline.
What was your process for creating the plugin?
By day I am an Android engineer. So, I consider myself an amateur in this space. However at the same time I have leveraged AI tools like copilot to guide me through building the plugin using TRMNL's official framework guide and best practices available in the help portal.
I primarily use TRMNL website's live editor to build and iterate on the plugin making sure it works and looks great on different layouts and different device types!
Did you learn anything that you want to apply to future or past recipes?
Shared template function is a great way to reduce duplication. I want to make more use of it in future plugins that I build.
Is there a tip you would give to a new plugin developer?
- Personally, as I love open-source, I tend to look for existing plugins that are already open-source by searching on GitHub using the
trmnl-plugintag and see if there is specific layout or concept I can learn from and replicate in my plugin if/when the use case matches.
What is your favorite plugin that someone else created and why?
I tend to stick with native plugins that TRMNL provides, especially the weather and calendar. However I've been amazed by many weather recipes and am planning to try the Daily Weather plugin for its simplicity and multi-day forecast view.
Editor's Note: Shortly after publishing Google Photos, Hossain created Google Photos Canvas, an adaptation that bleeds the closest color to fill the empty space around your photos.