The thermal quadrupole method for flat and spherical multilayered systems heated up with a modulated laser beam is developed and analyzed. The obtained results take into account the contribution of the thermal properties and optical absorption coefficient of the component semi-transparent layers as well as their interface thermal resistance, under a fully analytical framework. For opaque layers, they reduced to the results reported in the literature. It is shown that the thermal wave fields for spherical layers reduce to the ones for flat layers, under a proper limit on the radius of the layers. By analyzing the features of the normalized amplitude and phase as a function of the normalized frequency for one- and two-layer systems, simple and useful formulas to determine the optical absorption coefficient of flat and spherical layers are derived. The proposed approach extends the applicability of the thermal quadrupole method to deal with modulated internal heat sources, it allows determining the thermal wave field of any number of layers in a simple way, and therefore, it would be useful to perform the thermal and optical characterization of flat and spherical layered systems by means of photothermal techniques. © 2012 American Institute of Physics.