Google Hangouts has come a long way to be one of the most popular communications tools on android. Currently, the Hangouts Play Store app has been downloaded more than 1 billion times. It provides an effective way to keep in touch with friends, colleagues, and family. Better yet, it supports SMS/MMS, voice and video calls – all for free. That means that it’s uniquely placed to replace most of the other top communications apps available on android.The Hangouts android app can also handle SMS, which means that it can replace your default messaging app. In addition to Android, it’s also available on PC (you just have to be logged to your Gmail account on your browser) and basically any other Android platform. Among other things, Hangouts has seen increased usage as a photo sharing solutions. The application automatically and privates stores all photos that you share in Google Photos. You can easily access any photo shared via Hangouts (regardless of where it originated from – e.g. other devices such as PC) right on your Android device.
Access pictures shared via Google Hangouts
- Navigate to http://plus.google.com/photos or http://photos.google.com using your preferred android browser app.
- Log in using the same Google account that you use to access Hangouts. A highlight of different photos that you stored across various Google services will be displayed.
- Navigate to the ‘Albums’ tab. Usually, you can access it from More>Albums.
- You should see the Hangouts album. Its name should begin with the label Hangout:. In fact, the name of each album helps you make sense of the photos stored in it.
- In the case that you have multiple albums stored on your Hangouts account, it might cost you a piece of work to navigate through everything. However, you can find what you are looking for by simply typing the hashtag Hangouts (#Hangouts) in the input box that says ‘Search for your photos’. This done, click on ‘Search’ to load results. Only saved albums (Hangout) will show in the results.
- Once you are able to access your photos this way, via the browser, there will be options to make them public, delete them, share via Google+, comment, apply effects, tag people or create slideshows.