Google+ Privacy – How to Make Photos Available Only to Me on Google+

Note: the email upload feature was recently removed from Picasa Web Albums. This solution no longer works.

I was able to solve this by using If This Then That (thanks @Cawas) and the email upload feature of Picasaweb. Because Picasaweb albums are shared with Google+ this gives me what I want.

Here's what you need:

1. Turn on the email upload feature of Picasaweb
   1. Sign in to your account at http://picasaweb.google.com/.
   2. Click the gear gear icon icon in the top-right corner and choose Photos settings.
   3. On the General tab, in the "Upload photos by email" section, select the "Allow me to upload photos by email." checkbox.
   4. Enter a "secret word," 6-15 characters long. As you enter this word, an email address appears.
   5. Click the Save changes button.
   6. To email upload your photos, just attach them to an email message and send it to the newly-created address.
2. Create an album in Picasaweb and make it public. I named mine "Instagram".
3. Set up the Instagram to Picasa recipe on IFTTT.com.
   1. Set the email address to send to to be the same one set up in step 1.4.
   2. Set the email subject to be equal to the name of the album created in step 2.
4. Take Instagram photos!

Technically, you just need a recipe that takes from Instagram and sends an email message, but this recipe explains why it works and gives credit to the source.

If you want to get fancy, there are a few triggers you can use on the Instagram channel to only share photos with a particular tag, for instance.

I did some experimenting, although I didn't actually delete the photos (since I want to keep them). But I was able to select them all.

I'm using Chrome on Windows 7.

1. Open "Instant Upload" under your Google+ Photos
2. Hit the End key. Your browser window will scroll down to the bottom of what's currently displayed. Google+ will load up more photos. Hit End again. Repeat as necessary.
3. Click and drag from below and to the right of your photos to start selecting them. You'll have a shaded box to guide you. Start painting up and to the left to start selecting photos.
4. Without releasing the mouse button hit the Home key to scroll all the way back up to the top. You should be able to fine-tune the select area to capture all of the photos.
5. Click the "Delete" button (only visible at the top of the page).

I hope this is helpful.