How to Post Photos to Google+

How to post your photography on Google+.

First, decide how you want to share your photo on Google+.  A post is a post and an album is an album.  Posts are immediate and interactive.  Albums are for storing.

• A post shares photos on Google+ with text.  

Share a post from the Stream screen.  Clicking on the Google+ icon or the Home icon will take you to your Stream, where you’ll see this:

Creating the photo post from the Stream lets you add text to your photo.

Why add text to a photo post?  Adding text to a photo post allows you to include hashtags which can reference the photo to other groups, themes, or subjects.  These hashtags are like the hashtag system in Twitter in that they’re included in the body of the post.  Hashtags broaden your post’s exposure from your stream and your circles into the entire Google+ zeitgeist.

Hashtags are only available in posts.  I’ve tried including them in a description in an album post or a photo-only post, but the system doesn’t seem to accept them.  If someone has discovered a work around, please let me know.

Adding text also lets you tell the photo’s story.  Your photo is as much how you took it and what you experienced taking it as it is your photo itself.  People want to know your story.

• An album is a folder or portfolio for themes or groups of photos.

If you want to share photos of a particular subject or a particular event, then an album is what you want.

Create or add to a Google+ album wherever you see this icon:

Albums emphasize images, but restrict interaction or description.

When you’re creating or adding to albums, you’ll see that the Google+ system has options for a description and for tagging people in photos.  That’s it.  As far as I have experimented, you cannot add hashtags or create links or do any of the other kind of writing you can do in posts.  For me this is quite limiting.

While I see albums in streams on Google+ I really don’t notice them until I’m looking at someone’s profile. Albums act as a portfolio for your photos.  As I’m deciding to add a photographer to my circles, I often look at their albums to see what we share as photographers or what I find unique in their work.