Google Photos may not yet be available, but already it’s shaping up to be quite an improvement over the current photos system users have at their disposal within Google+. Aside from things like the new app design, new interactions, and new features for creating different types of photo collections like stories, it looks like Google is going to be bringing in new privacy features to the application in direct regards to another feature being introduced with this revamp which is link sharing. This may not be too unlike the way you can share links of photos or all other manner of files within Dropbox, but with it being present in Google Photos those who don’t have a Dropbox account or simply don’t use it to back up their pictures will still have a way to send pictures easily by sharing a link to grab the photo download instead of sending the image itself.
According to Android Police, Google Photos will introduce the functionality to share photos via links, which then be sent within emails, messages, social feed posts or virtually any means you can think of where users can insert a link. It also appears that Google will be adding the capability to share videos stored within Google Photos the same way, which will make it much easier to share videos with others due to the lack of size of a link compared to actually sharing the video file.
When selecting a photo or video to share, a new “get link” option will appear alongside all the other available choices, which generates the link for users who can then distribute the link however they wish. When it comes to privacy, Google will be implementing certain aspects for link sharing like the ability to remove geo-location from photos and videos before you generate the link and share it with others, as well as an option to wipe out your link history. The “remove geo-location” option states that removing said data won’t be available for images or videos shared by other means. As for the link history, Google will allow users to see their entire history of generated links which they can delete individually or in a batch, which will render the link inoperable after the fact where it may have been live before. So although the link will remain posted wherever it was shared, it will no longer work.
