Live Linking Photos With Mosaic

OK, this is pretty cool. 

Portfolio company Mosaic Archive has just released the latest version of their Lightroom photo synch software. Still allowing viewing of photos and editing of  stars & flags on IOS devices, it now uses Google Drive for infrastructure. This allows an interesting use.

By embedding my Google Drive link above, the photo displayed is the current image in my Google Drive. Since the source of that image is the synched version out of Lightroom on my Mac, if I make an edit in lightroom, it automagically appears here. This is essentially a live link, then, from my desktop photo editor to a web image!

I’ll play with this image in Lightroom occasionally just so any real nerds who check back here regularly will be able to see that it changes.

All this magic is provided by  for the low, low price of $24.99 in the Apple App Store. Don’t let the source fool you, though. Because your photos are stored in Google Drive, you can also see them on the web and in your Android Gallery or Photos apps. Oh, and this hot off the press: if you don’t have an IOS device, the Mosaic synching plug-in for Lightroom is only … free. You don’t get metadata search or synching back from you phone, but this trick will still work!

Here’s the trickery involved in linking to a live google drive image.

First, navigate to the image on the google drive web site. Click on share, this will bring up a dialog with a link to the image of the form:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2zI0vjbjAdfYmZtM3pNWVF4WHM/edit?usp=sharing

First, while you’re in this dialog, you’ll have to change the access control an make the image public.

Next you’ll need the string of crazy characters after the /d/ and before /edit. This is the FILEID. You want to grab that and squirrel it away.

Now the image embedding code you’ll want to use will look something like this:

<img border="0" width="450" src="http://drive.google.com/uc?export=view&id=FILEID" />

You replace the FILEID with your long string that you save before. Voila!

Thanks to this unofficial Google blog for the linking hint here.

Copyright 1997-2022, Ben Littauer