Have you been using Google Photos to store and serve your images on your WordPress website to then find out that no-one can see them besides you? Although you can view the images normally yourself, you keep being informed by your readers that they can see naught but a grey, no-enter sign box like the one below in place of the image?
I recently found myself in the exact same, frustrating situation. It just didn’t make any sense. The images were there; I could view them perfectly normally on any device and browser. Yet, somehow strangely, nobody else could. Trying to resolve this issue, I was at times about to hurl the computer out of the window, I considered quitting Google Photos altogether and look for an alternative image-hosting solution…
At last, however, I managed to figure out what was the issue. For some reason, when logged in to your account and copying an image’s address, Google Photos gives you an extremely long, temporary URL of sorts. If the image address you’re importing into your post looks something like the one below, it is wrong; this link is likely private to the account’s owner (thus you are the only one who can view the image), and bound to expire even if that is not the case.
Above is the marathon-long sort of link you should be getting by double-clicking on a Google Photos image and selecting “copy image address”. The permanent link of the image that you need should look something like this:
Unfortunately, there isn’t any direct way to obtain this link while logged in to your account that I could find. However, you can still obtain it by following these simple steps:
- Go to your Google Photos album and select “More options” (3 vertical dots on the top-right).
- Select “Options” from the drop-down list.
- Toggle the “Share” button on.
- Copy the link that will appear.
- Not done yet – Open a New Incognito Window (under “File” on Chrome browsers) and paste the link you just got in the address bar.
It will return the album viewed as an ordinary user instead of as the account owner. You may now copy the image address of any photo contained in the album and normally paste it into your webpage. Everybody, from any device and browser, should be now able to see the image normally.
