How to show pictures from Google Plus Photos in any website

This article shows how you can get a slideshow of all the photos from an album in your own Google Photos, which can be placed into a website or blog.

Sharing a photo album from Google+ Photos

Google's help-pages note that you can share a Google Photos album using a link - and is a good option for showing your photos to people who are outside of Google+.


But what are the options if you want to show a Google Photos album, not just an individual picture, in your blog or website?

• Put the link in your website. But that just gives bland, boring text, like click here to see my photos.

• Put one picture in your website, labelled "click this photo to see the rest", and link it to your Google Photos album. But that just shows one photo - and it takes people away from your website when they go to view your photos.

• Load each photo from the album individually to your website. That's fine for 2-3 or even 10 photos. But what if you've got dozens or even hundreds - it could take hours!

A better option is to use an embedded slideshow.

To do this, you need to get a small piece of HTML code from Google, and put it into your site. Then when someone looks at your site, the code runs and they the see a slideshow made of the photos your album at the current time.   This means that the pictures on the other website are automatically updated when you change the album in Google Photos (eg when you add, change or remove pictures).

Unfortunately there is no tool to make this type of slideshow code in Google Plus Photos at the moment.

But there is a very simple work-around which gives you get the code that you need, using existing Google tools.

Using Picasa-web-albums to get the slideshow code

If you have loaded pictures into Google Photos, then you can manage them using either Picasa-web-albums (ref: What is Picasa vs PWA?) or Google Photos.

So, to get the embeddable slideshow display code for a photo album:

• Log in to Google with your Google+ account

• Go to Picasa-web-albums using the do-not-redirect link: https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/myphotos?noredirect=1   (more about this link)

• Navigate to the album that you want to make a slideshow for.
  NB  you need to be viewing the album, not the page of all albums, to get the correct code.

• Make sure that the security for this album is set to at least "anyone with the link".

• Choose Link to this Slideshow and then Embed album from the right side bar

• Set the options you want for your slideshow.
  The alternatives explained in detail in How to make a slideshow of from Picasa-web-albums

• Copy the HTML code that is provided

• Install it into your blog or website in the usual way
  (Ref:  options for installing 3rd party code in Blogger).

What your readers see

Readers using a regular web-browser with Flash enabled should see a slideshow of your pictures - like this:

Readers whose device (eg cellphone, tablet) isn't able to show Flash graphics will most likely just see a black square instead of the album - possibly with a message telling them why this is happening.