Since nobody has posted a howto for Google yet, here’s one if anyone is interested.
If you want to use google photos, I’m going to assume it’s because you already use it and know how to upload photos to google. I’m not going to cover that.
So, if you want to use google photos as a free image hosting service, here’s how I do it.
Here’s a photo I took with my phone just to see if you would be able to see Jupiter and Venus on a phonetograph. It’s already on google photos:
Click on the share icon (the left-most on the upper right).
Than click the “Create Link” button (looks like two links in a chain).
That shares your photo so anyone can access and gives you a link (URL) that you can share. Don’t use that link directly on BLF.
Copy that link, and open it in another tab in your browser. That takes you to an album page showing the image you just shared. Click on the image. Then on that page, right click on the image and select “Copy Image Location” or whatever your browser says that’s simlar:
Now, you finally have a URL that is suitable for use on BLF. I use the Simple Post Editor, so I just click on the “Image” icon, and then paste the URL into the “Image URL” field, and the “(OPTIONAL) Link to URL” field in case folks don’t like the relative width I choose.
If you want to make sure you did it correctly, log out of google (or use a different browser where you’re not logged in to google), and view your post. If it works when you’re not logged in to google, it should work for everyone.
If you’re sharing a whole lot of photos, you can create a new album then share/create a link to the album. Then you only have to do that step once. After you open the shared link, you can just click on each photo in the album, and get individual URLs for each photo without having to share each photo from google.