Google Photos is great for storing your photos. It’s even becoming pretty good at sharing select photos with select people. But still, the problem for many of us from the Picasa Web Album days is displaying our albums publicly.
The problem:
There’s no good way to publicly display a specific Google Album, or a set of specific Google Albums, not even within Google itself.
Google Photos does not provide users with a public-facing Gallery page, so I have been using my Google Plus Profile Page and Google Collections to create something sort of resembling a public photo gallery of Google Photos Albums
If Google won’t give me a proper public gallery site, then I’d like to figure out how to make my own gallery from the albums I’ve already created in Google Photos.
The tool:
I stumbled across a tool at publicgallery.org that generates a slideshow of a Google Photos album that has been “shared.” (I am careful to differentiate that from a “Google Photos shared album.” Because Google.)
Entering the URL of a Google Photos album will give you some code that you can copy into html to produce a nice, if basic, slideshow preview of all the photos in an album. The slideshow can be played, or navigated through forwards and backwards, photo-by-photo. I added the few lines of code to the html of my Photography page where I wanted the slideshow to appear, and it worked.
You can see it in action on my Photography page.
So, thank you for this!
What it DOES do:
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provides a nice, lightbox-y viewer for photos in a particular Google Album that can be viewed directly on my website
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allows people to “scroll” (click back and forth) through the photos in an album one at a time
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creates a playable slideshow online
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allows me to manually add albums on a page (presumably as many as I want, organized in a grid to imitate a gallery page)
What it does NOT do:
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generate a gallery-type, thumbnail preview of the images within a gallery so the entire contents can be viewed or scrolled at a glance
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link back to the original album (So far, it seems that I would have to write my own title/link as a separate line, not part of the element.) It would be nice if the album title displayed within the viewer were a clickable link back to the album in Google Photos.
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update to reflect changes in the original album after the slideshow was originally generated. If a photo is later removed from the album, then instead of simply not showing that photo, the “forbidden” symbol is shown in its place. If a photo is later added to the album, it won’t appear in the slideshow. And, strangely, after playing around with adding/removing photos from this album, now the photos that are shown are displayed in a different order that I can’t quite figure out.
Conclusion:
This works as a slideshow/click-through viewing of a set of photos that you do not intend to change.
(I was hoping I could add more photos to my sample gallery as I took new ones, but it appears that won’t work.)
If you…
- have an album that is “finished” (its contents won’t change)
- only need a one-by-one viewer (either automatically playing or advancing on-click)
- have access to edit the html of a web page
… then this is a good solution and adding the code worked without incident for me to produce the album viewer on my web page.