Sharing and Licensing outside Google+

Google+ promotes how easy it is to share photos in Google+ photos. BUT they are only easy to share within the Google+ environment to others also with Google accounts, FURTHER that doesn’t easily extend to Google’s Blogger (which is the main place I share my photos on-line.) This has me totally puzzled because it was easy to share images outside Picasa Web Album via simple html code (which is still the most common way to link photos into any website or blog.) Fiddling around and looking through the unanswered Google forums I see I’m not the only one to notice this (and be ignored by Google). What I have found is you can share an image inside a Google+ post and then get the link to that post (there is a “link to this post” option on the drop down options on the upper right of the post). Alternatively inside blogger and by using the on-line blog posting tools you can select to insert pictures from your Picasa Web Album (not Google+ Photo!). The down side of both of these approaches is it takes extra steps and results with either or both extra and duplicated posts and/or duplicates of the photos in your Google+ photos albums. I’m not convinced the duplicates are second copies but more probably they are different links from different locations. This may not matter anyway if the photos are small (less than 2014 pixels wide) as small photos don’t count in your limit. However if you monitor number of views and +1, they are now potentially spread across up to 4 versions/album views.  The other feature I have been looking for is photo licensing. In Google+ photo there is no mention of photo ownership, or if an image is licences to be shared, say under a creative commons licence I can not find a way to do that either under the google+ photo view or general settings.

Don’t Panic

Things are not desperate yet. You can still do this things via Picasa Web Albums, which is really just an alternative way to view your on-line albums. Unfortunately you can no longer get to that view via the link in Picasa, on your desktop, it now connects to the Google+ photo view, At the moment the following easy to remember link still works- (bookmark it in your browser)

https://picasaweb.google.com/home

Clicking on the Link to this photo gives more options, both a simple URL links and the html code to embed the image in a blog or website page, and image size. The Photo reuse section expands if you click on the button Allow reuse (Creative Commons). You can get some extra details on creative commons sharing in Steve Gill’s Photography blog.