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For some time you could see pictures someone sent you via Hangouts in an album called "Hangouts". This vanished somehow.
When you open a picture from Hangouts on the Computer, you can still see in the URL that there is some kind of album. The URL is in the form https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/albums/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX and you can even browse this album.
How can I get to this album from Google Plus or Google Photos?
Go to https://get.google.com/albumarchive/
There you will found a album named Photos from Hangouts
When you click a photo in the Hangout history you will be sent to an URL that looks like https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/albums/string-1?pid=string-2&oid=string-3. To be taken to the album just delete ? and all the characters to the right of it. The resulting URL will look like this:
https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/albums/string-1
The photos owned by the user uploaded through Hangouts conversation can't be seen from Google Photos (http://photos.google.com), only on the owner Google Album Archive.
For each Hangout used to share a photo will be an album called "Hangout: Your Friend Name or email address ● Your Name" or "Hangout: Group name" on the photo sender account. It could be viewable by both users using the URL trick mentioned in the "Short answer" section.
1 Picasa Web Albums was deprecated on 2016. On August 2016 Google launched Google Album Archive where users could access their photos that used to be accessible through Picasa Web Albums (reference: http://googlephotos.blogspot.com/2016/02/moving-on-from-picasa.html)
Update for 2020 - I still could not find anyway to get all shared images. I made a small python script that downloads everything from chat history.
You can check it out in GitHub
It appears this has been deprecated. If you want to download all of the images that have ever been shared with you over hangouts, you need to use Google Takeout.
Google will send you a .zip link with all of the images.
Using Linux commands jq and curl on Hangouts.json from Google Takeout:
jq -r '.conversations[].events[].chat_message.message_content.attachment[]?.embed_item.plus_photo.url' Hangouts.json > urls.txt
while read -r l; do curl -O "$l"; done < urls.txt
This method will download all images shared to you and by you.
jq command: jq -r '.messages[].annotations[]?.url_metadata.image_url' messages.json > urls.txt and this bash loop: export i=1; while read -r l; do export i=$(($i+1)); curl -L -o $i.jpg "$l"; done < urls.txt - the filnames aren't usable so it numbers the images 1.jpg and upwards. Not all items with URLs are images and those are saved as empty files.
Viewing Photos shared with you
On https://get.google.com/albumarchive/ you can only see photos that were shared by you. To see the album of pictures shared with you by a specific person, perform the following steps:
