ssl photos problem

Question

Anyone know of SSL / https support for Picasaweb? I have a web site that uses SSL, but trying to display Picasaweb photos is a problem. IE8 keeps complaining with a pop-up "Do you want to view only the webpage content that was delivered securely?" Asking all possible web page users to change their IE8 settings sounds unfriendly (and unsecure) to the user.

It would be easier for users and developers to have https://picasaweb.google.com. Does Google not provide it just because of the SSL compute expense? Or perhaps some governments' regulations? Does anyone know of a good photo archive web site that supports https?

Answer 1

The reason you are getting that error is because you are mixing http and https content on the same page and IE is just giving the user a warning that not everything he is seeing will be encrypted or secure.

One way of possibly fixing it is to proxy the Picasa pages through your own web server. So instead if linking to the Picasa site directly in your page and letting the users browser connect to Picasa and your site, your web application will download the content and pass it along to the user. To the end user it will look like all content is served from your web server, all through https.

Answer 2

I doubt you will find any photos sites supporting https. One of the main problems with running a website over https is that nothing gets cached - this would potentially cause a large increase in bandwidth usage for the site serving up the photos.

Consider whether you need to use https for something that is viewing photos, or whether your site could better be organised so that you use https to log in, or edit secure content, but switch back to http when you are simply viewing non-secure content such as photos.

Under Internet Explorer, you will never be able to get around the secure/non-secure message problem.