Uber Geeky!

It’s not made very clear, but apparently Picasa don’t allow hotlinking to full sized images, although they seem to make an exception for blogspot blogs. I’ve suspected something like this was the case for a while since the Android splash screen image in my first post tends not to render most of the time (until I’ve visited Picasa, and it gets cached). I just noticed that my dysfunctionally hotlinked image of the android splash screen is on page 2 of a Google image search and decided it was time to get to the bottom of this.

Visiting the image URL directly also always works, so I suspect they check the referrer URL, and if it doesn’t belong to Google, they return zilch. I got a bit of confirmation about this from the Picasa forum, and also found a solution (hopefully). If you click “Link to this photo” and look at the “Embed image ” html, you’ll get a scaled down thumbnail URL in there. You can also specify a larger size thumbnail up to 800 pixels in width. I’m now hoping the full size thumbnail URL I’m using will stay active.

Personally I’d like to keep using Picasa to manage all my images, but all this jumping through hoops is a bit out of control. If this method doesn’t work then I’m shifting to Flickr.