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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?

5 Answers 5

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Short answer1

Go to https://get.google.com/albumarchive/
There you will found a album named Photos from Hangouts enter image description here

Long answer

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.

References

Update Notes

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)

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  • 1
    Looks like the Picasa Web Albums only includes photes shared /by me/ not pictures shared /with me/. The url trick still works though showing an album on G+ with all the pictures.
    – rumpel
    Nov 1, 2016 at 16:08
  • @rumpel: Thanks. I updated the answer.
    – Rubén
    Nov 1, 2016 at 17:26
  • @rumpel not anymore...
    – Line
    Feb 20, 2019 at 14:48
  • I wonder how this will work as G+ is deprecated. Apr 9, 2019 at 1:46
  • @DustinGraham Google Hangouts dependency on G+ Albums was removed sometime ago, so Hangouts albums will not be affected by the G+ shutdown
    – Rubén
    Apr 9, 2019 at 21:48
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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

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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.

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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.

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  • For the latest iteration (Google Chat) you need to download the Chat zip from Takeout as above, find the corresponding Groups/ directory then use this 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.
    – Steve
    Sep 20, 2021 at 14:16
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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:

  1. Navigate to the Person’s G+ Profile (by clicking on the person’s icon in Hangouts)
  2. Select "About" button in the profile’s header
  3. Scroll down to "You & Person" and click "See all photos"
  4. Select the "Photos from Hangouts" album
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  • I don't have "See all photos" :(
    – Line
    Jan 21, 2019 at 8:42

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