Tuesday, July 23, 2013

How to use Picasa-web-albums, without being re-directed to Google+ Photos

This article is about how to you can start Picasa-web-albums in way that stops you being immediately re-directed to Google+ Photos.

Update - August 2016

The article below was written in 2013, and has remained correct until very recently.   But changes which Google started rolling out from 1 August 2016 mean that it is now obsolete.    See the article Picasa-web redirects, August 2016 update for more information.

The following article is kept here for historic purposes only.



What happens when you start Picasa-web-albums?

If you have a Google+ account, either because you only signed up for Google recently, or you had a Blogger account first and then linked your blog to Google+, then you will know that if you go to Picasa-web-albums), you are immediately re-directed to Google+ photos.
When this happens, at the top of the screen, for a few seconds, there is a message saying:
 "Click here to go back to Picasa Web Albums."

But if you do something in Google+ photos, this top banner message disappears, and the only way to get it back again is to close and re-open Picasa-web.   This is tedious - it's a waste of time opening one website just so you can re-direct back to another one.



How to skip the re-direction message

To use Picasa-web-albums, without being sent to Google+ photos, you just need to start it using this link:    https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/myphotos?noredirect=1

I'm going to put it into the sidebar of my blog very soon, so I have easy access to it.


Is there a problem with using Picasa-web instead of Google+ Photos?

You might wonder if there is a problem with using the old Picasa-web-albums instead of Google+ Photos.

In short, the answer (for now anyway) is no, there is no problem - and I don't expect there to be one anytime soon.

Why?

You still only keep one set of photos in your Google account.   It just happens that Google now have two pieces of software that can access these photos.   One is Google+ Photos, and the other is Picasa-web-albums.    And they both work on the same underlying pictures and photo-albums.   So it won't cause you to run out of space, or to have duplicate copies of your photos.

And Google still need to maintain Picasa-web-albums because there are a substantial number of Blogger users who choose to be anonymous:   Google+ photos simply will not work for them, because it absolutely depends on having the photos associated with an individual, named persons profile.   (And I'm pretty sure that there are no easy ways to transfer ownership of photos from one Google+ profile to another, either, in the event that you want to transfer ownership of your blog.)

Of course we don't know if this will last forever - but my best guess is that you can safely keep using Picasa-web-albums for a good while yet.




Related Articles

Transferring your blog to another Google account's ownership

What is Picasa vs Picasa-web-albums - a basic introduction

Creative-Kit photo editor works from Google+, if not from Picasa-web-albums

Options for showing photos in Blogger

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4 comments:

  1. Thank you so much for this information. I resent being required to use Google+ and until I found your post I couldn't work out how to access my albums the 'old' way. Much appreciated!

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  2. I just noticed that the latest photos I have uploaded to my blogger blog are not showing in Picasa Web Albums. I would like to organise the photos but have no idea where they are! The folder simply stops at an earlier photo. I have not signed in to Goggle+. Any ideas where the photos might be?

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  3. There is another reason someone might want to use the no-redirect tag. My corporate environment doesn't allow me to go to plus.google.com, blocked at the firewall/proxy because it's a social media site, and the people in charge seem to think that it's a bad idea for me to go there. As a result if I attempt to go directly to the picasa web albums, the redirect ends up in a blocked page announcement, w/o any option of seeing the 'click here to go back to picasa web album' flag. Being able to use the ?noredirect=1 url element means that I can get to my albums, which are not blocked.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi!
    G+ provides unlimited place for your pictures
    But the only problem I find is that G+ doesn´t give the links to publish the pictures in your blog (I mean not the URL but the embed)
    That´s what I use to manage my travel blog.
    If Picasa dissapears, I don´t know how I will manage that
    Best regards from Argentina
    Elisa

    ReplyDelete