Google__ The Missing Manual - Kevin Purdy [50]
After adjusting the people and circles you’d like to share with, check out the little lock icon below the +Add field. As you learned in Chapter 3 (Sharing Others’ Posts), people viewing your photos can share them with their own circles, just like they can share posts you write. Click the “Lock this album?” link to get more info about locking albums. Basically, locking an album lets you share its photos specific circles and people, but prevents them from easily sharing those photos with other people. To lock the album, click the box to the left of the lock icon. If you later want to unlock it, simply click that box again. If you want to change a photo back to being visible to “Only you,” simply remove all the people and circles from the +Add box, and then turn on the “Lock this album?” box for good measure.
NOTE
If you want to do some serious album editing and organizing, it’s a lot easier to do that on the Picasa site rather than on Google+. Head to http://picasaweb.google.com and click the album you want to edit. Near the top of the screen that appears, click the Organize link. On the next screen, select the photo(s) you want to reorganize (hold down Control [⌘ on a Mac] to select multiple photos). You can then drag them to change their order in the album, or click the Copy, Move, or Delete buttons on the right side of the screen to do one of those things. (If you click Move, you’ll see a dialog box that lets you put the image[s] in either a brand-new album or one of your existing ones.) All the changes you make on the Picasa site should instantly be reflected in your Google+ albums.
NOTE
Just like posts, albums you’ve locked can’t be shared by your friends by clicking the Share link at the bottom of your post, but that doesn’t prevent your friends from taking a screenshot of your photo, or downloading it through some other geeky trickery. So consider locking more of a request for privacy rather than an iron-clad guarantee of it.
Changing visibility for multiple albums
Above all the photos in the “Your albums” section is a “Change how your albums are shared” link. Click it to display a window with privacy settings for each and every one of your albums. Use the drop-down menu in the middle of each album’s row to choose the visibility option you want. Your options are the same ones you learned about back on Choosing Who Sees Your Posts.
You can change these same settings before you share a batch of photos as an album (Including Photos and Videos in Your Profile) or when you click an album and then click its “Visible to” setting (Editing and Deleting Photos). But this window is the most convenient way to make changes to a whole bunch of albums or just double-check what people can see when they wander over to your profile and browse through your photos. Once you’ve got all your albums set the way you want, click Done to close the window.
Changing visibility for individual photos
There is no setting in Google+ to change the visibility of an individual photo. The simplest work-around is to put a photo into its own album, and make that album visible to whomever you’d like, as shown above. Otherwise, Google+ seems to expect that if you have a photo you want to make visible, you’ll click the Share button when looking at it in the lightbox view, and send it out to certain people, or whole circles.
Fixing Photos and Getting Creative
Got a photo that could look better, or maybe just looks wrong on Google+? Click it to open it in lightbox view, and then click the Edit Photo button (or link) below the photo to see a menu with