Thursday, March 9, 2017

A tinyurl helps you to easily post Google Photos elsewhere

Google Photos can be a blessing and a curse. While providing some great functionality to backup, sync and organize your photos from multiple devices, Google Photos can be painful when you need to reuse your photos on some of your other favorite sites such as Pinterest, Houzz, blogging and social media sites.

Recently I was trying to put some of my Google Photos on Houzz, a site for sharing home improvement design ideas and projects. I figured I would just right click, copy the image link from Google Photos and use it in the upload widget for Houzz. This didn't work! After a few attempts I've realized that the link URL is too long to be pasted into the the file chooser text box of Explorer.

I then figured I would use the photo 'Share Link' used for sharing the image with others. I had high hopes that this link could be used to upload the image to Houzz. No, that didn't work either!

As a last ditch effort, I've tried to shorten the very long image link URL (over 600 characters!) using the tinyurl website.


The shortened URL worked like a charm!
Using the tinyurl I was able to upload the picture with the Houzz upload widget.

This could be a relatively easy workaround to the vexing problem of easily posting your Google photos to other sites. Let me know if this works for you!