Still Can’t Access Google Photo Albums

This can only mean that your album is not yet public (being able to provide a link for the album is different from making it public), and that is not something that Photonic can help with.

See this thread, where the user has provided a third-party solution: https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/problem-with-google-photos-gallery/#post-8481297.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by Sayontan Sinha.

If you open an incognito tab in chrome and point your browser to the URL of my album, you will see the pictures:

https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipOUGTHbC9OJ6kqoznf5zgjTZYmZwPyC3i-XuJQ5Si-_gjgb1TmlfhCWLP828EtUjA?key=dm9kNUNsUEVLbWlMWi1pUWpvaEVNYi1VdFBTQkxR

Doesn’t this mean the album is public?

Unfortunately that does not mean that the album is public. Ever since Google Photos began taking over PicasaWeb functionality in May, it has completely done away with public photos. What you have given in the above is really a “shared” album, or a “protected” album, not a “public” album; there is no setting in Google Photos to make something public. If you look at the “Sharing Options” in Google Photos, you will only see “Anyone with the link can see these photos”, which is the most liberal option.

What do I mean by a public album? If you go to https://sayontan.smugmug.com, you are going to see 3 albums. Those are public albums. There is no equivalent link in Google currently, that lets you see all of a user’s public albums. This wasn’t the case with PicasaWeb. Amongst the 3 albums you see on my Smugmug site, the Bushveld album is protected by a password, which is synonymous with the former authkey setting of PicasaWeb. That option too, is gone in Google Photos. I also have private Smugmug albums that you don’t see at all, which are akin to what Google has as private albums.

To illustrate the point better to you, try accessing this link from Chrome’s incognito mode: https://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/api/user/sayontan?kind=album&prettyprint=true. You will only see 2 albums, though I have quite a few which are “shared”. Now, try the same link in Incognito mode, but replace my user name, i.e. “sayontan” with yours. You will not see your “shared” album listed there.

Basically, Google has put up a nearly unscalable wall around its photos. To make things worse, they stuck to using the old PicasaWeb API while their entire security model around Photos changed. I investigated multiple alternatives to get around this, but there is no way to get the API to show them.

You could enable authentication (supported by Photonic), but that would require your site’s visitors to have Google accounts.

Alternatively you could use the link I provided in my previous post to make your photos public.

In addition to my post above, feel free to see here: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/photos/WuqfNazcqh4. Google just completely messed this up. As long as PicasaWeb was around, you could make things public, but now the only way to do it is via third-party tools.