Does Google Images allow hotlinking? - hotlinking

I wrote a script that uses the Google Images JSON API to automatically fetch thumbnails for posts. I'm currently linking directly to the thumbnail (eg. http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTok4m3DWNRv8gxMDTE0bwj8m-jYl2UGdlbc7ig158m0XosD-lcQEIFcg). Does Google allow that?
If not, I should be allowed to download the thumbnails to my server right?

Its all about traffic. If your app will make tons of traffic, they can ban your server.
Anyway, better/best way is to ask them about this subject.
Also this might help you : Google Terms of Service Highlights

I see problems when you download the image thumbnail to your server and render. Images shown in search results might be copyrighted/inappropriate. They are crawled images so the owner can request google to remove at anytime. On contrary, if you cache them locally and render, I see the workflow is broken and you might be rendering image that ideally should have been revoked.
Coming back to hot linking, can you explain bit more on the actual usage context. What API you are using, what are you searching at, do you own the website / posts that you are filtering?
Also image search API is deprecated one. By terms it would be active only for three years since notice.

Related

Why is Instagram not using signed URLs?

I was just dabbling a little with the Instagram API and noticed that all the media links (e.g. image / video URLs) that point to the fbcdn are publicly accessible.
I usually try to use signed URLs for user-generated content and was wondering why Instagram apparently is not choosing to do that?
If they would do that, the URLs that are used to render the webpage or the app for example could only be valid for a couple of minutes so if someone should collect them (for example to scrape user profiles) they wouldn't be accessible anymore afterwards? I know this is not perfect but it feels like it would at least give the privacy aspect a little extra notch...

try to get content in google plus from China

I am a developer from China where we cannot access content from google plus or facebook due to some "special reason(been blocked)", and I want to get some wonderful content from google+, and put them into my online education website, all content is about learning knowledge.
So my first solution is: call google+ api to get these content, then store them into my site DB(of course, I will write clearly where those are from), but this solution is only for the text, for images, most of them were stored in googleusercontent.com(which is also blocked in China), and I don't want to download these images then store to my own website(overload is too big).
I want to transfer these pictures into other websites(not been blocked in China), then I noticed site: getpocket.com can save image from other websites, and they seem have some cache, can I use this feature? after get image url from google+, then call getpocket api to save this image, but don't know where api will return the cached image url), is it possible do this?
Does anyone have good solution for this images? so I can transfer these good learning knowledge to Chinese people?
(google+ activity api like this: https://www.googleapis.com/plus/v1/people/108305986241738899171/activities/public?maxResults=20&key=)
thanks everybody
I use mongoDB to store image which will be transfer to base64 string. e.g: http://www.tomylearn.com/netTest/index/listInfonews.do?categoryid=47

Upload and share image on Google+

I can't seem to find any documentation or reference on upload and sharing images on Google+.
Is this action current supported in google+?
Their moment sharing seems to accept thumbnail url, but I don't want to keep the image hosted on my site once it is created and shared by visitor.
You have a few different options, but I'm not sure any of them are really what you're looking for.
Google+ doesn't really allow outside apps to upload and share something automatically.
As you've observed, the closest you can get is generating a Moment for them to share. And while there are similarities to Instant Upload, it isn't identical. You could probably use a data url to encode and store the image as part of the moment, but I haven't tested this.
Another alternative is to use the Google Drive API to store the image in their Drive space, permit the image to be read publicly, get a link for it, and use this link as the thumbnail URL. Similarly, you might be able to use the Picasa Web Albums Data API to store the image. Both have good, but different, integration with Google+. The former is more modern, while the latter has more features that are tailored for images.

Sharing on Google+ with big image (photo sharing, perhaps)?

I'm currently working on a Google Hangouts app that, among other things, features posting links to certain pages on the user's Google+ page.
Because the shared content is mainly a visual thing (dynamically generated images, to be precise), I have been looking at ways of having the post
on user's stream display a big, full-width picture, essentially an effect similar to one visible here (disclaimer: I do not endorse the company linked in any way, it was simply one of the first examples I have found of the look).
Now, I've read through Google+ documentation on Share Button and Snippets about ways to have sharing from a single click and customisation of the content that comes with the link, but visually, the attached thumbnail is somewhat smaller than what I'd find ideal for the task (as visible ).
The example of a big picture display was tied to the photo sharing functionality, so I've looked at Google+ API, to see if there's a way to automate it, but as stated on the API docs landing page, "The Google+ API currently provides read-only access to public data.". No ability to pursue the goal through the official channels then.
Next step, GitHub. There are some sites for which the wrappers around their internal communication have been written, thus creating sort of unofficial API, so I tried my luck there. Among various libraries, I have found one that was not a wrapper around an official API, google-plus-extension-jsapi, but being written for the context of Chrome extensions rather than webpages, I couldn't get it to work, mainly due to usage of WebSQL and cross-domain XMLHTTPRequests.
Without any further leads, I ask the community thus - is there any way for a webpage app to provide the user with the ability to share a full-width picture on their Google+ stream or am I limited to standard sharing thumbnails?
I will confirm, you can not do what you're trying to do using the Google+ API because there is no stream write API and you do not have control over how shares will render.
As you have already determined, you can not write posts, such as a picture, directly to a user's stream, without the user's interaction (e.g. share). For branded pages, there is the Pages API, but it is currently not public and would be restricted to Pages as opposed to People/Profiles.
You can generate a share link to an external image and then if the user clicks it, the image can appear in their stream. As you noticed, the image will be a small thumbnail as opposed to a full-bleed photo and will render as a share - undesirable if you want the image to fill the whole stream area.

How to make a Tag cloud app that post on a website?

I want to make an app where the users can post messages that will be displayed on a website. The users would need to create a username and password to be able to post.
The app would be like a twitter, but only be able to post through the app and read the last few posts and not be able to write private messages.
The website would function like a huge cloud of thoughts where everyone could go and read what others have written. Once the post hit the cloud, they can't be deleted. Only me could delete posts.
All posts would have different color and font size, it would look like a huge tag cloud on the website.
How do I make an app and a website like this?
David H
The tutorial application for Google Application Engine is an unstyled version of what you describe. They'll even host it for you for free (up to a non-trivial level of usage).
The tag cloud creation is not so very hard but without knowing your preferred language it is hard to point you to helpful libraries (there are plenty out there).
Getting people to use it will be the hard part.
added in response to comment:
Good luck on your endeavor. I would be surprised if you weren't able to learn everything you need to know and have a working web app by the time school starts. I found a simple stand alone web cloud creation library that explains what it does and will run on GAE. So now even that part is in place for you.
I'm tempted to make some pathetic reference to the sorts of computing that I did prior to high school, but I expect that you probably have SD data cards have more computational power than I had available to me. Kids these days! ;)