How to embed a photo or video from Google Photos on a website or blog

The good thing about using Google to store your photos and videos is that it's probably going to be around for a while and so your precious stuff isn't going to disappear if a flaky tech company closes. The bad thing is that you can't do much to organise or display things the way you want (despite Photos' unpredictable and uninvited efforts to create albums for you).

The best of both worlds would be to leave your items in the care of Google but to be able to embed them on another site, exactly how you want to see them - effectively creating a window through to Google without copying or moving them.

That can be done. Here's a ten-point instruction list, which isn't as complicated as it looks the first time you do it:

1. Upload the photo or video to your Google Photos account.
2. Open Google Drive in the same Google account and find it in Google Photos in the left-hand menu. (If it’s not there, start playing it in Photos and select the Google Drive icon top right, Add to My Drive. Now open Drive and it’ll be there.)
3. Highlight the photo or video and click the Share button, top right of the screen (the person icon with a plus sign).
4. On the Share with others window, click Advanced, bottom right.
5.  On the first option under Who has access, click Change, and in the window that opens, choose the second line, On - anyone with the link. Click Save.
6. Back on the Share settings page, click Done.
7. You are now back on the Google Photos page, with your photo or video still highlighted. Click it to open or play.
8. Now select the three little buttons at the far top right of the screen, and choose Open in new window.
9. The new window looks very similar to the old window, but the three little buttons are in a slightly different position top right. Select them again and this time, you’ll find Embed item… on the list.
10. Click it to display the embed code that you can copy into the html of the webpage on which you want to display the photo or video.

NB: if you copy from Photos to Drive in item two, you'll be using up some of your 15Gb of free storage, whereas in Photos, under certain conditions, you can store as much as you want. So it's best to wait for the photo or video to appear in Drive's Photos tab if you can (especially for videos, which use up so much more storage).

My thanks to Sue Waters in Australia for her explanation of this process, which you can find here, along with other interesting information about what you can do with Google Photos.