Synopsis of Problem: As more people join Google+ many bloggers who use the Blogger/Blogspot platform are inadvertently and irretrievably deleting all of their blog images from the Google+ interface. Some have been blogging for years and there is no feasible way for them to go back and re-add the thousands of missing photos back into their blog.
If however you only changed your privacy settings from "Public" to "Limited" simply re-setting the album back to "Public" will make the images visible once again. You can do this from Google+ by clicking on the "Photos" link in the black tool bar at the top of your browser. Select the "Actions" then "Album Properties" and look for the visibility option in the lower left corner of the dialogue box. Re-set to "Public on the web."
Here's how it happens. This is what my "Your albums" view looks like on Google+
If I click on the album titled "Blogger Photos" this is what I see. Multiple versions of some of the same images. I have no idea why I uploaded these same thumbnails to use as profile pictures so many times but herein lies the problem: People who just joined Google+ basically stumble upon these photo albums for the first time ever while on Google+, not realizing they are the photos they've added to their blog via the photo uploader in Blogger. They think there is no need to keep them because why do I need five or six versions of the same photo on Google+?
When I click on one of the images this is how it pulls up the enlargement of that image. There is no obvious way to discern how many times this photo has been viewed or why there are so many copies of the same image.
As a reflex, many people are choosing to delete the album because they aren't logged in to Blogger nor are they on Picasa where their uploaded blog images have been stored. Even those who realize their blog images are hosted on Picasa reasonably assume they are viewing copies of their blog images that were added to Google+.
The thing is, they are viewing the original images on Picasa even though the header at the top of the page reads Google+. So they delete the album on Google+ which means they just irretrievably deleted the same photos from their blog.
So many people have done this that Google has added a dialogue box to warn people that Google+, Picasa and Blogger are all interconnected.
But in my opinion, their warning is still insufficient.
Just this morning I tried deleting an unneeded album while on Google+ to see what would happen. When I clicked on the "Delete Album" button above is what happened. A small and nondescript dialogue box opened warning me that if I permanently delete this album it will remove the photos from all Google products including Picasa and Blogger.
My question to Google is: Why is this box so nondescript when they are potentially communicating with people who may be about to inadvertently delete hundreds or even thousands of photos from years of adding them to their Blogger blogs? That's a big deal. It seems to me there should be:
- A larger box
- A larger font
- The warning should be in bold
- The name of Blogger should precede Picasa since many users don't understand their images are stored on Picasa
- Instead of saying "reverted" say "undone" because it's easier to understand
- The box should be more urgent in appearance utilizing the color red as a border to signify its importance
This is what I think the dialogue box should look like instead.
As I continued to research last evening I found more and more examples of people deleting their Blogger photos by accident which made me wonder why Google doesn't also send an email to all Blogger accounts that this is an issue to be aware of when joining Google+.
It is so disheartening to know that many more new users to Google+ will most likely continue to accidentally delete their blog images not realizing until too late they will not be able to undo what they have done.
Related posts on this subject here on The Flirty Blog are:
7/28/11
More on Missing Blogger Photos and Google+ (Update 2)
7/21/11
WARNING: To Bloggers Who Use Blogger/Blogspot, Missing Images and Joining Google+
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