The shareable link that you get from Google Photos cannot be used in many applications, it doesn't just show the picture, it also puts it in a display showing the date (and any other pictures that you have included in the same shareable link)
Instead, you need to:
- In Google Photos, click into the picture you want to use, so it is the only one on the screen
- Right click, and choose Copy Image URL (that's the option in Chrome,
other browsers have slightly different words for the same action)
- Paste that Image URL (not the shareable link) into the Image-URL
field in Maps.
So, this is a bit of an old question.. but it still doesn't seem to be solved.
Here are some additional people complaining about the issue...
I have many thousands of photos (~10k) in Google Photos and I wasn't about to manually go through each one by one - so instead I hacked together a little tool that uses the Google Photos API to get a list of URLs for photos that are NOT in any album.
The Google Photos API also provides no direct way to find not-in-album photos! So my tool builds a list of ALL photos and then goes through each album's photos individually and removes them from the all-photos list.. finally resulting in a list of photos that are NOT in any album.
It can take a while (with 10k photos, like 10+ min? I didn't time it). This isn't helped by the fact that the API only allows a few photo entries to be returned per API request (so it has to do a ton of requests to get them all).
I just hacked the tool together, so there may be bugs? But it should be safe (it only asks for read-only permissions), and it seemed to work fine for me. It simply outputs a list of URLs (for out-of-album photos) - it DOES NOT delete them or put them in an album or anything (although that could be done via the API it was more dangerous and I didn't need that feature myself).
The tool's source-code can be found here: https://github.com/jonagh/gapi-querier
You can run it directly off of github here: https://jonagh.github.io/gapi-querier
However, you will need to create Google API credentials (and get the client ID to enable access to the Google API).. some basic direction on how to go about doing that is in the readme (see: https://github.com/jonagh/gapi-querier).
Note that this is not a professional tool, it may have bugs, it may not be user friendly, it may require some technical knowledge to get it to work (ie Google API credentials), use at your own risk (though it should be fine).
Best Answer
At this time Google actively changes its image service behavior. Now, there is not any algorithms how to receive direct and permanent links to your shared photos. The URLs are received by the right-button click, like
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/(LONGLONGCODE...)=w800-h600-no
, are temporary and live one-two days and then will be closed.You can try new Google service - Google Archive Album. This service was created as holder for albums from the deleted Picasa service. But it contains photos and albums from Google Photo too. The Google Archive Album have two greats advantages:
For working with Google Archive Album you need to follow rules:
But how long time Google Archive Album will working I don't know :(
P.S.: If you don't know - URL links from Google Photos and Google Archive Album can be tuned. For detail reads the special site.