From today, the way you can load images into maps saved to Google Drive is changing. This post explains the impact on users, administrative requirements and the reasons for the change.
- From photos to Drive
- Why is this changing?
- Security implications
- What to do if you do not want to allow additional privileges?
- Administrative requirements
From photos to Drive
Previously, MindMup allowed users to load images from their Google Photos directly to MindMup. Instead, you will be able to load images stored to your Google Drive.
The images will be stored embedded within the maps, for easy access when sharing. With Google photos, it was possible to just store a link to an image, so images did not really affect the size of your maps. With the new image system, each image you add will increase the size of your map, which may affect loading and saving times.
Previously added images from Photos will still work, to the best of our knowledge.
Why is this changing?
Google is removing support for accessing Google Photos directly from the picker widget for third-party apps, making it impossible for us to continue providing this feature.
Security implications
The next time you try to load an image into a map, you will most likely be prompted by Google to grant additional privileges to MindMup. So far, MindMup only required access to the files created by the MindMup application. To see image thumbnails in the Google picker widget and be able to load it into MindMup, you will need to allow the application to download any file from Drive.
What to do if you do not want to allow additional privileges?
We understand that granting full access to Google Drive might not be convenient for everyone, but unfortunately the Google Drive picker widget does not show images with tighter restrictions.
As an alternative to using images from Google Drive, you can switch to using MindMup cloud storage, where you can directly load images from your disk.
Administrative requirements
If you integrated MindMup with your GSuite authentication system for the whole organisation, you may need to grant additional scopes to the application, so that your users do not have to individually approve the scope. You can do so using the following steps:
- Open https://admin.google.com, and sign in as the GSuite administrator
- Select “Apps”
- Select “G Suite Marketplace Apps”
- Select “MindMup 2 for Google Drive”
- Click the “Grant access” link