Google’s new social service has been progressing by leaps and bounds, with over 20 million users expected by the coming weekend, and the service has not even been opened to everyone yet! If you’re among one of those users who’ve been invited already and are using Google+, you might be wondering how to take the most out of it through your mobile device. Android, being Google’s own brainchild, has had a native app for Google+ from day 1, but iOS users have not been so lucky. While Google has submitted a Google+ app to the App Store for review, Apple has let Google’s submissions hang in the limbo without approving or rejecting in the past.
With that in view, your best bet is to find alternatives, and while Google+ mobile web application is quite capable, it naturally does not bring the ease and comfort of a native platform app. Here’s where this trick will come in handy; in this article, I’ll explain how you can take advantage of Picasa and Google+ deep integration to upload photos to your Google+ stream right from your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad.
The app we’re going to use for this purpose is a free Picasa client for iOS –Piconhand. Since Picasa, being a Google product, is deeply integrated with Google+, you can upload photos to Picasa and have them publicly or privately available in your Google+ profile.
Assuming that your Picasa account is linked with Google+ (which it is, by default, unless you change the setting yourself), launch Piconhead on your iOS device and provide the credentials for your Google+ account.
A five-tabbed interface will give you an overview of your existing albums, tag pictures, as well as an option to upload images. In the Album view, hit the arrow icon on top right for more options, tap the + sign and add a new album (you can name the album anything you like).
After saving the new album, navigate to the Uploads tab and hit the + sign again to add new images. You’ll be asked to choose which album to upload images to; select your newly created Google+ album.
You can either snap a photo immediately or select some from the existing ones. Select the photos that you want to upload to Google+ and hit Add. The next view will allow you to edit the picture’s attributes such as its file name and caption.
Once you’re satisfied with everything, hit the Start button to initiate the upload process. You can monitor the progress for each file as they get transferred over-the-air to your Picasa album.
That’s about it. Your recently uploaded photos will be viewable in your Google+ stream, in Photos. In Google+, you can change the visibility/privacy of your newly-created album to restrict the photos to a particular circle or even select few people. For better control, I’d recommend creating multiple albums with the name of your circles and set their privacy manually so that you can be absolutely sure your uploads won’t go to any unintended recipients.
Google+ has a lot of potential to alter the social network scenario for good, and we hope Apple will not treat the iOS native app for Google+ the same way it has done with some in the past. Until that happens, however, this method might be your best bet to share on Google+ the best of your photographic creativity right from your iOS device.
