Tip Trick Here: How to Embed Images from Google Photos into your Website

26 October 2016

How to Embed Images from Google Photos into your Website

Google Photos is the best service for backing up your digital photos to the cloud. They have no storage restrictions, your can upload images as well as videos, and visual search helps you find photos by people or things in them. There’s one feature though that’s still missing in Google Photos.

You can easily share your photos with anyone using a simple link but Google Photos offers no option for you to embed an existing image into a website. That is, if you have already uploaded an image onto Google Photos, you can’t directly embed it into your website through Google Photos.

I wrote an app to help you embed #GooglePhotos in your website https://t.co/cDt4NorvWi http://pic.twitter.com/mq7J4h4qzj
— Amit Agarwal (@labnol) October 25, 2016

Google Photos as an Image Host

Embed Google Photos is a new web app that, as the name suggests, makes it extremely easy for you to pick any image hosted on Google Photos and place it on a web page using simple HTML code.

Here’re the steps involved:

Go to photos.google.com and open any image that you wish to embed in your website.
Tap the Share Icon (video tutorial) and then choose Get Link to generate a shareable link for that image.
Go to http://j.mp/EmbedGooglePhotos, paste that link and it will instantly generate the embed code for that picture.

Open your website template, paste the generated code and save (see sample). The image will now serve directly from your Google Photos account. This technique can also be used for embedding images in HTML Mail without having to use an external image hosting service.

Embed Google Photos – How it works?

When you share a single photo via a link inside Google Photos, it creates an unlisted link that is accessible to anyone including those who are not logged into their Google Accounts. Internally, the app downloads the page behind this link and extracts the Open Graph tags to determine the direct link of the image and the underlying photo album.

Also see: Google Photos – The Good Parts

The embed app only works for single images and not albums. One more thing. I am not aware of any bandwidth limitations for images shared via Google Photos. If have a very popular site, this may not be the way to go.