Using Google Photos as an image host?

[malG]

I've been using quite a few free image hosts but over the years I find them not reliable and some have had serious downtime. I recently tried using Google Photos to host my images in forums. It seems to be working fine but how come it's not widely promoted? Is there a drawback to this method?

 

[NuclearNed]

Is Google Photos the same as Picasa? I've used Picasa for years without any problems.

 

[malG]

Is Google Photos the same as Picasa? I've used Picasa for years without any problems.

Not Picasa https://photos.google.com/

 

[cronos]

Not Picasa https://photos.google.com/

They're for all intents and purposes, identical. Just go to picasaweb.google.com, you'll see the same pictures that are in 'Google Photos'.

 

[malG]

They're for all intents and purposes, identical. Just go to picasaweb.google.com, you'll see the same pictures that are in 'Google Photos'.

Yes same pictures but very different layout.

 

[malG]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Photos
Google Photos is a photograph and video sharing and storage service by Google. It was announced in May 2015 and spun out from Google+, the company's social network.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa_Web_Albums
Picasa Web Albums (PWA) is an image hosting and sharing web service from Google, often compared to Flickr and similar sites. The service links with Google's photo organizing desktop program Picasa.

Back to my original question...

 

[KB]

Is there a drawback to this method?

Googles terms of service change often. They could easily forbid it, or just drop the service altogether. They have had many project flops and have cancelled even some successes out of nowhere.

http://www.wordstream.com/articles/google-failures-google-flops

 

[cronos]

Yes same pictures but very different layout.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Photos
Google Photos is a photograph and video sharing and storage service by Google. It was announced in May 2015 and spun out from Google+, the company's social network.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa_Web_Albums
Picasa Web Albums (PWA) is an image hosting and sharing web service from Google, often compared to Flickr and similar sites. The service links with Google's photo organizing desktop program Picasa.

Back to my original question...

Are you seriously quoting wiki to... heck I don't even know what exactly you're trying to do, really 😀

I use Google's photo storage extensively (I don't really care what it's currently called or whatever new name Google decides to come up with), so I'm familiar with whatever methods to access it, including setting up the albums and some amateur post processing from the Picasa desktop app.

So, back to your question, I don't know if there's any actual drawback. 'Google Photos' (the name) is relatively new, and maybe people just aren't familiar with it. My family has been sharing pictures using Picasaweb with each other since even before Picasaweb was swallowed by Google+ (now it's been decoupled again), so we've always been using the same Google-based storage to share photos. The methods slightly change through the years, but it's all the same damn collection of photos.

 

[Murloc]

in my experience no embeddable image host is forever.

They either get too popular and start being too slow to even just load the website or delete pictures, or they're not popular enough and they close down.

 

[John Connor]

Since I don't care about most pics I use here, I just use imgur. The others go on Photofuckit. (Actual cracker, I mean Photo Bucket)

Pretty lame not to allow attachments FFS.

 

[Ichinisan]

in my experience no embeddable image host is forever.

They either get too popular and start being too slow to even just load the website or delete pictures, or they're not popular enough and they close down.

My Dropbox /Public folder still works fine. The /Public folder does have a periodic bandwidth limit. Not sure how much...

 

[John Connor]

Didn't know Dropbox had a public folder. I'll have to look at that. I also have Box and Adrive.

 

[Ichinisan]

Didn't know Dropbox had a public folder. I'll have to look at that. I also have Box and Adrive.

Yeah. Right click any file there and choose "copy public link." No worries about the image being re-compressed / converted or having EXIF data modified...

However, it's frustrating to try and get a link that works the same way when I'm working from mobile. The mobile app copies a link that I can't embed and it tries to load some kind of web image viewer...annoying.