Upload a Photo Album full of Pictures to Google Plus?

There are two major ways you can work with your photographs on Google Plus, actually. One way is to use Picasa, which now has tight links with Google Plus and which shares all its content if you so indicate. The advantage of Picasa (which I think will eventually be renamed Google Photos) is that it offers more control over what you're doing, including letting you set the cover image that shows up larger than any of the other images when the album is displayed to users.

The easier way, however, is to use G+ directly, so let me show you how to do that and if you really want to tweak things, you can jump onto Picasa afterwards for some fine tuning. Or just not worry about it. :-)

When you're on your Google Plus page (what? don't have one? Check out my article How to Sign Up for Google Plus immediately!) the top shows this:

Click on the second icon from the left to get to your photo area: you can't click on the camera icon in the status update area and upload an album. Now you'll be seeing a display of the photos people in your circles have uploaded. That's not what we're here to see, however. Stay focused. On the top right you'll see:

Click on "Upload New Photos" and you get a big drop target:

Select all the photos you want to upload to G+ and drag them into the middle region:

Now, while they're uploading, go back to the top input field and type in the name of the album you'd like to use. Notice in my screen capture above it's called "October 16, 2011". Instead, I named mine "Hot Air Balloons from my Backyard".

The upload proceeds and as the images are uploaded you'll see the pics show up:

Finally, when everything's uploaded you'll have the chance to share it with your followers and friends, including adding a comment or note at the top, as you can see I've done:

Google Plus also has a nice mosaic-style display of the photos from your album, as you can see here:

The largest image, on the top left, is the cover photograph and that you can't select from within Google Plus, but, as I said earlier, if you pop over to Picasa you can pick the featured image if that's a big deal.

Finally, here's what everyone who has you in a circle on Google Plus will see:

Pretty cool, eh? Google Plus does a very nice job with photo display and though there are a few tiny things that could be tweaked (like being able to pick the featured image) I have no complaints overall!

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