How To: Add photos to a dashboard

Host the photo online

In order to display a photo in your SharpTools dashboard, it will need to be hosted online somewhere. You may already have your photo hosted online if you use a service like Google Photos!

Note: In order to display the photo in SharpTools, it will have to be ‘publicly’ accessible. What you might be surprised to hear is that photos on services like Google Photos already use an unguessable public URL. These URLs are often upwards of 40 characters long meaning there’s billions upon trillions of possible combinations which makes it more secure than your average password.

The Verge has a nice article that goes into more details on Google’s approach and how it’s secure.

Imgur

Imgur is a popular photo sharing site that can be used to share photos online for free. One unique feature of the service is you can choose to mark a post as Hidden and it can’t be searched for, commented on, nor displayed in your Imgur profile.

Note: Imgur URLs are much shorter than Google’s, so even though you can mark a post as Hidden, it’s not as unguessable as the Google Photos approach. Imgur Post Privacy Settings

  1. Open https://imgur.com
  2. Tap the New Post button in the top-left corner
  3. Drag your image onto the drop zone or click the Choose Photo/Video option and select your photo from your computer / device.
  4. After the photo uploads, you’ll be taken to the post
    Note: The post should be set to Hidden by default as indicated in the top-right corner
  5. Right-click or long-press on the image and select Copy Image Address

    Alternatively, you can copy the Share Link and append .jpg to the end of it.

    For example, https://imgur.com/oNiccDx becomes https://i.imgur.com/oNiccDx.jpg

Google Photos

Google Photos is a popular free cross platform photo service that can be used for managing your photos.

:warning: The URL that’s produced requires that you are logged in to your Google Account in whatever browser you view the dashboard on. Otherwise, the image link is only valid for 1 hour.

In our case, we’ll be taking advantage of the URLs that are automatically generated for Google photos.

  1. Sign in to your Google Photos account at https://photos.google.com
  2. (Optional) To upload a new photo, drag a photo from your computer onto the page or tap the Upload link at the top of the page.
    Note: After uploading your photo, you may have to tap on the thumbnail that appears in the bottom-left corner or refresh your page to see it in your list of photos.
  3. Tap on your desired photo to view it full screen
  4. When viewing the large (fullscreen) version of the photo, right click or long-press on the image and choose Copy Image Address

    Important: We need a link directly to the image which is why we must right-click on the image and copy the address. If the native ‘Share’ feature of Google Photos is used, it will link to a webpage which displays the image rather than directly to the image itself.