how to use Google photos for photo hosting

[ironymaiden]

i'm still experimenting with how to best embed photos in DW, since their hosting is so limited. (for on-the-go, i've got IFTTT hotlinking Instagram, thanks to annofowlshire and this applet with a few key edits.)

today i'm trying Google Photos, which works pretty well as of tonight. (if you're an Android user, you probably know about this thing. it's not the same as putting photos in a folder on Google Drive, which confused me for some time.)

Edit to add: as with any photo hosting, if you do something to delete the photo, the photo is gone and you will break the link. Google Photos is pretty aggressive about turning on their back up service on phones. if that's enabled, it will also bother you about deleting the originals from your phone. if you do "free up space" inside the Google Photos app, all is well. if you go into your phone's "gallery" or folders or other not-Google Photos app and delete the original, Google Photos will sync and delete the photo from your cloud storage. tl;dr use the Google Photos app when you want to clean up your phone storage.

1. in Google photos (https://drive.google.com/drive/photos or https://photos.google.com/), select the photo you want to share.



2. if you're on the drive.google page, click the link icon on the upper right and switch link sharing to ON. if you're on the photos.google page, click the share icon on the upper right and select Get link. (yeah, i don't know why there are two interfaces with slightly different features either. actually i can guess. software people be crazy.)
   
   copy that link.



3. now we cheat. go to this page (and bookmark it): https://ctrlq.org/google/photos/. paste the link in the box and click Generate Code.



4. at the bottom of the page, you have links to the photos. if you know how to write an img tag, img src= that "Direct Link (URL)".
   
   otherwise, take the "Image Embed Code" and paste it into your draft entry. the way it's written, the image will display in your entry, and clicking it will take the viewer to the image in your Google Photos.

if you don't want to directly associate your Google Photos ID with your DW, you can get rid of the link part. delete everything before <img src= and then also delete the </a> at the end.*

example embed with the link removed:

mmmmmm raclette.

*i note that the developer identifies as a facebook link and his origin site. i'm not sure what that part is for. personal promo? to satisfy some google rule? anyone know? also, i can't promise that this dude isn't using your photos for his machine learning project or his spank bank.

Comments

[butterflydreaming]

What about the thing where if you delete the photo from your phone, it deletes it out of G Photos as well (because of sync)?

Maybe I'm missing a step.

[ironymaiden]

I have mine set to back up,so it hasn't been an issue for me. I'll add some info about how that works.

[butterflydreaming]

That's what I was missing. I saw it was backup "& sync" which seemed to be the opposite of what I wanted to do.

This is one of those things where I realize I still have old assumptions, because I was thinking that I might want to keep *some* pics on my phone & delete only specific ones. Then I realized that most of the time, cloud storage is going to be all anyone needs. Including me.

Thank you

[celticflower]

Thank you so much for this, it's working for me in 2019 after ages looking around wondering why Google wouldn't load in Dreamwidth! Why don't they just give us a link that works! Anyway, thank you :)