"HOW" - "HOW TO" - "HOW DO"

This article describes how to get the URL or internet address of a picture in Google Photos, and the difference between Google's shareable links and URLs. Google Photos is a tool that help bloggers (and everyone else) to manage their picture collections. It replaces Google+ Photos, and works alongside Picasa-web-albums.   You can read more about it here . In Google Photos, there are two different types of web-address for a photo. One is the URL , and this can be used to refer to pictures from Blogger, or from other tools that want a link that just shows the photo, eg Twitter, Google Maps.  This is the traditional style of internet-address for a photo. The other is the shareable link.   This is what Google Photos provides from the Share function.   Shareable links can be used in Facebook, and other places where the photo that is being shared is displayed within a web-display, rather than just as a picture.   (Ref:   How to make and manage shareab...

This article describes how to get a link to one ore more photos from your Google Photos collection, using the Shareable Link controls.   It also explains how to delete shareable links that you have made in the past Google Photos is a tool for managing picture collections. It replaces Google+ Photos, and works alongside Picasa-web-albums.   You can read more about it here . Shareable Links are a new type of linking introduced in Google Photos, which let you easily share one or more pictures at the same time.   You can email them, or use them in tools like Facebook. When someone opens a shareable link, they see a display with the date, the name and picture of the person who is logged in to Google at the time, and all the pictures that are included in the same shareable link. If you want to use an image from Google Photos in a tool which cannot use shareable links, you need to find the URL for the photo, instead. How to get the shareable link for one photo in Google Pho...

This article describes a way to tell Google about problems with activity on your AdSense account. I noticed a link to an Invalid Clicks Contact form in a recent blog-post from Google. You can find the form here . Basically, this is a way to tell Google if you think that something has gone wrong with your AdSense account, for example if you are being click-bombed or similarly targeted by malicious people or activity. This caught my attention because exactly that happened recently here on Blogger-hints-and-tops: from reading the AdSense help forums, it seems that bots (or something) were attacking Link Units, and suddenly lots of people were getting huge increases in both click-through rates and revenue-per-click. At the time, I followed the advice given there: Remove the Link Units,  Remove the site from the approved list   Post a "me too" message on the support forum thread,  Wait for Google to act against the bad guys.  But it still felt wrong not to take a more ...

This article shows how to change the date associated with a picture in Google Photos. Update- August 2015 There is now a feature to change the date of individual pictures or videos in Google Photos. To use it: Navigate to the picture / video you want to set a new date for Click the "information" icon (small "i" currently near the top-right of the photo viewer screen) In the right hand panel, hover your mouse over the item in Details which has a picture of a calendar beside it. Click on the pen icon which appears while you are hovering Enter the new year, month, date and/or time (in 24-hour clock) for your photo or video. Click Save. Job Done!   You have now changed the date stored with your image or video. There are still some photos that you cannot see through Google Photos (eg ones uploaded directly through Blogger with some settings, or shared in Google Hangouts).   For these you need to use the date-editing features in Picasa-web-albums, which are described belo...

This article explains how to change the author of a post that has already been published in Blogger. Blogger posts and changing post-authors When you Publish a post in Blogger, a number of features are set up for the post, as well as the contents.  These include: The URL / web-addresss where the post can be found The post date/time when it was published The post-author (which is now set the first time that the post is Saved , ie even before it is published.) The labels that apply to it. Some of these can be changed by editing the published post . But there are some features that cannot be altered after they are set. In particular, Author is not changed even if a different Google account  is used to edit the post - or if the original author has their permission to write to the blog  removed. This can lead to interesting situations on multi-author blogs, especially when one writer leaves the team and perhaps even deletes their Google account.   Because of th...

This article explains how you can control who can send mail on your behalf if you have a gmail account, why you might want to do that, and how to stop people from sending email messages on your behalf. If you have given other people rights to publish to your blog  , then you may also want to let them send emails on your blog's behalf - particularly if you are using an "organisational" email account.   I do this for several blogs - eg the one for the choir that I'm currently doing public relations for. This is a way to let the the other people use their current email client, ie what looks to them like their "normal email", but still to send official-looking messages from your organisation or blog. Note that this is not the same as spoofing , which is a way that people with malicious intentions create email messages which appear to come from your account, even though you didn't send them and did give anyone else permission to send them. Spoofing, ie sendin...

This Quick-Tip is about using the Creative Kit, which has been giving me grief recently when I tried to use it from Picasa-web-albums. Sept 2013 update:   Creative Kit has now been totally discontinued.   Use either Picasa-web-albums or the Google+ photo editor instead. For ages, I've occasionally used the photo-editor in Picasa-web-albums (the online version of Picasa ) to edit photos that I've already uploaded, and want to change without changing the URL.   This editor was originally Picnik - until Google sold that product and replaced it with Creative Kit a while ago. This has sometimes been slow, which was annoying, but I put up with it because it was just so useful. But recently it stopped working totally:  it would load, the progress-bar would get about half-way along the screen, and then hang, with a message: We noticed Picnik is loading slowly. It’s possible waiting may solve this issue. If you’re still having trouble: [t1]   Click for Assistance» Wait...