Posting photos from Picasa Web Albums

Dear Dyxumers,

Recently I noticed that some of you have problems posting photos hosted on Picasa Web Albums. At first it seems that Picasa does not allow so-called hot-linking, however it turns out that it is perfectly possible. Here is a short introduction how to do this. I hope that you will find it useful.

To show the image you need a link to it (please note that this is not the same as the link to the web page hosting the image). How to get this link? If you use Firefox then it is fairly simple: display the image (i.e. you should be in the "photo view" and not "album view") then right-click on it and select "Copy image address" (or something similar). This will copy link to the image to the clipboard. If you use IE, then it is slightly more problematic: right-click on the image and select "Properties". Triple-click on the address - this will select it all - then copy it to the clipboard. There is also an alternative approach, which works both in Firefox and IE: to the right of the photo you have a link called "Download photo" - just copy this link (right-click on it and there should an option to do this - "copy link address" or "Copy Shortcut" or something similar).

Now, having the link you can paste it inside IMG tags, but to make it work two slight modifications are required. Let's see it on an example: here we have a link to the photo on RosieA100's Picasa web album (thank your Rosie very much indeed) as copied from the "download" link:

http://lh6.ggpht.com/RosieA100/R_NyDEd-iXI/AAAAAAAABdw/UovkdOB8Fx4/DSC03639.JPG?imgdl=1

The first modification is to remove everything after and including the question mark (marked in red above) - the link must end in ".jpg". But that's not all - we have to change the path a bit to indicate the size of the photo. For this we have to add the part marked in green:

http://lh6.ggpht.com/RosieA100/R_NyDEd-iXI/AAAAAAAABdw/UovkdOB8Fx4/s512/DSC03639.JPG

According to Picasa web page allowable sizes are following: 32, 48, 64, 72, 144, 160, 200, 288, 320, 400, 512, 576, 640, 720, 800. Just use the size that suits your needs. Please note that these sizes mean "number of pixels the longer side of the shot" i.e. height for vertical shots and width for horizontal ones.

Now a few examples to check how it works:

Size 144:
http://lh6.ggpht.com/RosieA100/R_NyDEd-iXI/AAAAAAAABdw/UovkdOB8Fx4/s144/DSC03639.JPG


Size 400:
http://lh6.ggpht.com/RosieA100/R_NyDEd-iXI/AAAAAAAABdw/UovkdOB8Fx4/s400/DSC03639.JPG


Size 800:
http://lh6.ggpht.com/RosieA100/R_NyDEd-iXI/AAAAAAAABdw/UovkdOB8Fx4/s800/DSC03639.JPG


I hope that you will find this instruction helpful/useful.

Happy shooting,
MiPr



Edited by mipr - 28 April 2008 at 09:19

Thanks, very useful.

belgianpie wrote: Picasaweb is a pain to get the links working ... do as I do and get a photobucket account too, easy to link ... and also easy to upload ... I just have Picasaweb to show my family and friends ... and anyone who wants to look at them ... photobucket to link to forums ...

That's probably good advice. I've also found that Picasa really over-punches up the contrast when uploading/compressing images.

Regardless, the advice above worked! Thanks.