Technology

How to Embed Images from Google Photos into your Website Google Photos is the best service for backing up your digital photos to the cloud. They have no storage restrictions, your can upload images as well as videos, and visual search helps you find photos by people or things in them. There’s one feature though that’s still missing in Google Photos. You can easily share your photos with anyone using a simple link but Google Photos offers no option for you to embed an existing image into a website. That is, if you have already uploaded an image onto Google Photos, you can’t directly embed it into your website through Google Photos. Google Photos as an Image Host Embed Google Photos  is a new web app that, as the name suggests, makes it extremely easy for you to pick any image hosted on Google Photos and place it on a web page using simple HTML code. Here’re the steps involved: Go to  photos.google.com  and open any image that you wish to embed in your w...

How to Add a Picture Password to your Google Forms Google Forms have this “all-or-none” problem. The forms are either public (anyone can fill your form) or, if you are on Google Apps, you can create forms that are visible to everyone in your organization. It is however not possible to restrict access to forms to specific people. Another shortcoming is that Google Forms do not allow passwords or CAPTCHAs to prevent spam bots from filling your forms with random data. Google itself maintains the reCAPTCHA project but it is not known if integration with Google Forms is in the works. There is a workaround, though. Google Forms with Picture Passwords Google Forms do not support CAPTCHA but they do offer an option to attach images with questions. These can be used as picture passwords. The idea is simple. We add a multiple-choice question where the user is asked to pick an image from a selection of multiple images. If they select...

How to Make Phone Numbers Callable in Google Sheets If you click an email link on a webpage, it opens your default mail program. Similarly, you can make phone numbers on your website “callable” meaning when someone clicks the phone number, it will launch the dialer on their mobile phone and initiate dialing of the specified phone number. It is recommended that you make phone numbers clickable as more and more people would be accessing your site on their mobile devices. How to Insert Clickable Phone Numbers in Web Pages We use the simple tel protocol to convert a plain text phone number on a web page into a clickable telephone link. For instance, if you click  this link  on a mobile phone, it will open the phone dialer prefilled with the specified number. There’s no need to copy-paste numbers. How to Type Phone Numbers in a Google Sheet It is a bit tricky to type phone numbers inside Google Spreadsheets. Here’s why: Phone numbers are mostly made of...

See the Email Sender’s Company and Logo in your Gmail The default layout of your Gmail inbox has the sender’s name listed in the left most column followed by the subject and the date of the message. The emails are  sorted  in reverse chronological order with the newest messages listed at the top. The problem with this layout is that you cannot figure out who the actual sender of a message is without actually opening the email. For instance, if you get an email from Angus who works at Google and a second email from another Angus who is employed with Microsoft, Gmail will simply show Angus as the sender for both emails. To solve this exact problem, I wrote  Gmail Sender Icons  and it is now available for everyone. It is a Google Chrome extension that will make it easy for you to identify the company or the organisation of the email sender right inside the message list of your Gmail inbox. Check out the screenshots and you’ll get the i...