How to post pictures from Google Photos

[rod]

I use Google Photos to store and manage most of my photos, but it's not obvious how to insert images from there into a forum posting without exposing your Google account and all the other photos in it. Then I ran across this article which described a somewhat difficult method, but led me to an easier way.

The trick is that the image must be in a shared album, otherwise people who are not logged into Google as you will not be able to see it. Do the following:

1. Put the photo into a shared album in Google. Albums are good anyway to keep things organized. Make sure the album is marked as shared; if not go to its Options to turn on sharing.
2. Open the photo from within the shared album.
3. Right click on the photo and select Copy Image Location or similar, depending on your browser. If your device has a touch screen and no mouse, try long-press instead of right click (works for me with Firefox but not Chrome).
4. In your forum posting click the Insert Image icon and then Ctrl-V (press the Ctrl and V keys together on your keyboard) to paste in the URL that you copied above. It will be very long! Or with a tablet/phone, long-press, position the cursor and then Paste.
5. Look at the end of the URL that you pasted in, and change the image size width/height values after “w” and/or “h” before the “-no”. For example change "=w1317-h741-no" to "=w800-no". This will make the size more suitable for forum display.

Below is a photo that I have inserted using this method. If you are logged in you can click the "Reply with quote" icon (to the left of my avatar) to see the details (but do not submit that reply).