An unofficial blog that watches Google's attempts to move your operating system online since 2005. Not affiliated with Google.

Send your tips to gostips@gmail.com.

July 18, 2010

Picasa Web's Unlisted Gallery

Picasa Web Albums added a link at the top of the page that lets you share most of your albums: "unlisted gallery". The URL includes an authentication key that can be reset from the settings page.

"Albums set to the most private visibility setting - 'Sign-in required to view' - will not be displayed unless the person viewing is included on an individual album's 'Shared with' list. Your unlisted gallery has an authorization key in the web address; this key is a combination of letters and numbers which makes the web address very difficult to guess," explains Google.


The name of this feature is confusing: while the standard gallery only includes public albums, the unlisted gallery displays both public and unlisted albums. At least you only need a single link to share all your public and unlisted albums.

{ via François. }

7 comments:

  1. I seriously think it is a security risk.
    I never want to show the unlisted album to the public. But I want to use the images in public places like blog theme, content etc. Now, if somehow someone gets the url (by bing/yahoo search), they can have all my files at-once. As there is already a public album option and you can add people to sign in required to view option, this is useless and Google's indention to make your private things public is visible here.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Seems a bit pointless because the unlisted albums are still accessed using the original (album specific) "authkey".

    Therefore even if you "Reset unlisted gallery secret key", anyone that has bookmarked the underlying albums can still access them. You would have to reset each album independently.

    I would have though they would implement it by allowing two authkeys to access the actual unlisted albums, one being the album key, and the other being the master/gallery key.

    @Remiz: You can link to images independently of revealing the album or gallery authentication key.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Looks like I've knew it since a few months ago.
    Only my personal photos are unlisted with sign-in required or only can be viewed for some peoples w/ contacts. Well, not a big change for me actually. It's not so hard to hide your photos in Picasa. But maybe there will be some problems with the "authkey" parameter in the URL.

    ReplyDelete
  4. PicasaWeb needs a serious rework to support sub-folders if Google seriously plans to use it as a photo storage/editor for ChromeOS. There is not no way, today, to just syncronize your photos by using an album for each single directory of your pictures.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Plus, you can't choose any Picasa picture as your Gmail contacts pictures because they need to be set to Public. You can't choose as public ONE single photo... great!

    ReplyDelete
  6. you can't choose any Picasa picture as your Gmail contacts pictures because they need to be set to Public. You can't choose as public ONE single photo... great!

    ReplyDelete
  7. I used a product called TudZu. You can share all your Picasa albums using a private and secured network (private P2P architecture). You just import your picasa albums in TudZu. Any modification is applied to TudZu entry. You can set specific right access to your friends.
    (http://www.tudzu.com).

    MusicBBA.

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.