I'd love to be able to use my photos from external sources without hitting the limit

[#1]

By external sources, I meant some other photo sharing services like Google Photos or imgur. It's just not very convenient to having download the photo first, then uploading it to the Connect post.

I think it's a known fact that Connect has a hard limit of photos that can be posted. No matter how conservative we are in posting photos, sooner or later we will hit the cap.

I would love the ability to post photos directly from my Google Photos album, and not having it counted against the cap.I know Lithium is not a Google product and I don't know how complex it is to build the feature, but I thought it just makes sense since most Local Guides takes photos with their phone and use Google Photos for storage/ backup purpose.

As for Imgur, technically we can reference an imgur link to get the photo, but (to my understanding)  it's basically getting the photo and having it uploaded, making it to be counted as part of the quota (please correct me if I'm wrong).

[Csaba]

Hi @iyudhi, no, it does not take the quota. I think when Lucio reached his quota (or was close to it), started to just embed images from other URL's and that was when they got downloaded and uploaded here and when he complained, the team did something to prevent it.

[ErmesT]

Is here @iyudhi

https://www.localguidesconnect.com/t5/Help-Desk/Tips-for-Uploading-Images-to-Connect-to-Stay-Within-...

[iyudhi]

@Csaba oh I see! I wasn't aware of the change. So let's say if I embed a post from an Imgur link, it will not take the quota? If yes, that's definitely great news. But it's still a bit of a hassle having to upload it first to imgur, then getting the link to be used. Thanks though, this definitely ease the pain a bit!

[iyudhi]

@ErmesT Are you referring to sharing a link to a Google Photos album? If yes, the photo itself won't be shown on the post right? The readers would have to click on the link to the Google Photos album to view the photos?

[ErmesT]

No, you can embed a photo too, duty you should set the "sharing parameters" if the photo too. @iyudhi

The result is exactly the same shared by @Csaba, but you should use the HTML version of Photo, so it is quite hard to do it on mobile

[iyudhi]

@ErmesT Gotcha. I always get the impression that embedding a photo from any link will get counted as part of the quota. Wasn't aware that the rule has been changed. Must have missed the memo. Granted, it's still not the ideal way of doing it, but it's definitely something. Going to play around with it soon 🙂

[PaulPavlinovich]

Oh yus, this is really important. Being able to link in from external sources would be awesome.

[FaridTDF]

@ErmesT if you have to go through several applications to embed a photo in Connect, the mobile experience is frustrating and the user ends up not doing it, this using html or an ITL url instead is for users with patience not for a mobile, this is a point that needs to be solved from another side

[TraciC]

Hi @iyudhi. I'd love to see Google Photos integration but it's not something we've been able to do so far though are working on it and having your ideas here is something that helps us in making change.

As @FaridTDF said, linking to a photo source via HTML (which does not go against your photo limit as you're not uploading it) is an alternative but requires hosting elsewhere and is not friendly for mobile. 😞 

[iyudhi]

Thanks for the note @TraciC. Yes I often use Imgur links to embed my photo, but when I did it, the photos always shows up in the album afterwards, so I always thought they were counted agains the quota when I did it this way. So either I was mistaken, or the rule was changed and I didn't know about it. Although I do believe we need a better solution, I'm glad that people aren't locked up from posting photos once they reach their limit 🙂