Albums

Included in Free - This feature is available in the free version of MediaVerse.

Group your photos into beautiful collections - tell a story, document a trip, or organize your portfolio with a single shareable album.

What You Can Do

• Create albums to organize related photos and videos together
• Add photos from your existing media library to any album
• Set a cover photo that represents the album
• Control album privacy independently from individual photo privacy
• Share albums with friends or keep them private
• Embed any album on a page using a block or shortcode

How It Works (for Users)

1. Go to your media dashboard and click Create Album
2. Give your album a title and optional description
3. Choose a privacy level: public, members only, friends, or private
4. Click Add Media to pick photos from your uploads - select as many as you like
5. Drag photos in the album to reorder them. Click the star on any photo to set it as the cover
6. Click Save Album - your album is live and appears on your profile
7. To share your album, copy the album link from the album page and send it to anyone

For Site Owners

1. Albums are enabled by default once MediaVerse is activated
2. To embed a specific album on a page, use the MediaVerse: Album Viewer block in the block editor - select the album from the block sidebar
3. Or use the shortcode [mvs_album id="123"] where 123 is the album’s post ID
4. Users manage their own albums from their media dashboard
5. Admins can view and delete any album from Media > Albums in wp-admin

Album Privacy

Albums have their own privacy level, and media added to a non-public album inherits it.

When you add a media item to an album, its privacy is clamped to the more restrictive of the two. Adding a public photo to a Private album makes that photo private, so it stops appearing in Explore and in other members’ feeds. The clamp only ever tightens: an item that is already more restrictive than its album keeps its own setting, and a public album never changes anything.

Two things this does not do:

• Changing an album’s privacy later does not re-apply to items already inside it. Only the moment of adding clamps.
• Removing an item from an album does not restore its previous privacy.

Site owners who want album and item privacy to stay fully independent (the behaviour before 2.3.0) can return false from the mvs_album_inherit_privacy filter.

If a user can see the album but not a specific media item (because the item’s privacy is more restrictive still), that item is hidden from the album view.

Displaying an Album

Gutenberg Block: Add the MediaVerse: Album Viewer block, then select an album from the block settings.

Shortcode:

[mvs_album id="123"]
[mvs_album id="123" columns="4" show_title="true" show_description="true"]

Attribute	Default	Description
id	(required)	Album post ID
columns	3	Grid columns to display
show_title	true	Show the album title above the grid
show_description	true	Show the album description

REST API Endpoints for Albums

Method	Endpoint	Description
GET	/mvs/v1/albums	List albums
POST	/mvs/v1/albums	Create album
GET	/mvs/v1/albums/{id}	Get album
PUT	/mvs/v1/albums/{id}	Update album
DELETE	/mvs/v1/albums/{id}	Delete album
GET	/mvs/v1/albums/{id}/items	List album media
POST	/mvs/v1/albums/{id}/items	Add media to album
DELETE	/mvs/v1/albums/{id}/items/{media_id}	Remove media from album

Creating an Album via API

curl -X POST https://yoursite.com/wp-json/mvs/v1/albums \
  -H "X-WP-Nonce: YOUR_NONCE" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "title": "Summer 2025",
    "description": "Photos from our trip",
    "privacy": "public"
  }'

Adding Media to Albums via API

curl -X POST https://yoursite.com/wp-json/mvs/v1/albums/ALBUM_ID/items \
  -H "X-WP-Nonce: YOUR_NONCE" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"media_ids": [101, 102, 103]}'

This fires the mvs_album_items_added action, which triggers BuddyPress activity updates if BuddyPress is active.

BuddyPress Activity

When media is added to an album and BuddyPress is active, the mvs_album_items_added action updates the upload activity item to reference the album. This replaces the generic “uploaded media” activity with “uploaded media to [Album Name]”.