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Thursday, July 21, 2011

WARNING: To Bloggers Who Use Blogger/Blogspot, Missing Images and Joining Google+

I think a lot of Blogger/Blogspot users wrongly assume their uploaded images are stored on Blogger/Blogspot. But they aren't. They are stored on Picasa.

A friend, who recently joined Google+, just messaged me that almost all of their photos on their Blogger/Blogspot blog are missing.

I did some research for them and soon discovered there are at least two ways this can happen. One is extremely concerning because it involves Google+.  As more people join the new social network it's inevitable that unless/until Google+ more clearly explains to new users that removing their existing Picasa Web account, albums or images can directly effect their blog images, new Google+ users may continue to inadvertently delete all of their existing blog images which, as it turns out, is what my friend did.

DO NOT Delete your Picasa Web to join Google+ if you are a Blogger/Blogspot user.

If you haven't already joined Google+ but intend to do so you need to be aware that if you are using the image uploader provided by Blogger to add photos to your blog posts those photos are being stored in a Picasa web photo album associated to your blog.

I believe it's the second item in the screenshot image above that people are concerned about. It's the one that says:

"Your album's visibility settings aren't changed, but people they're shared with can now share them with others."

You read this and decide you don't want to let your friends on Google+ share your images with their friends.

This means if you:
  1. Remove images from your blog's Picasa album
  2. Delete the album completely
  3. Delete your Picasa account
  4. Assume the album you see in Google+ is a duplicate (it's the original) and delete it (ETA: I read online the Photos Community Manager Brian Rose said in a Google Group that Google will ". . .make it clearer that your Picasa photos themselves are displayed on Google+ and not copied" which should solve this problem.)
  5. Create a new Gmail account and move your blog to the new account then delete the original Gmail account (This is the only non-Google+ issue)
You will lose all of your blog images hosted in the associated Picasa photo album(s) meaning they will disappear from your blog. Forever. 

Every missing image on your blog will look like this :(

The only way I've found so far to recover your missing Blogger images after joining Google+ is if you "hid" and didn't "delete" them. This means you already joined Google+ and chose to make your Picasa albums "private" your images are recoverable and will still be there when you simply make your Picasa account public again making the images viewable to everybody.

There is also the possibility that somehow your Picasa privacy settings changed to a "Limited" viewing option so be sure to confirm that they are set to "Public."



ETA: Follow up posts on this subject here on The Flirty Blog are:

7/28/11
More on Missing Blogger Photos and Google+ (Update 2)

7/22/11
Missing Photos on Blogger Blogs and Google+ (Update 1) includes screenshots of the current (imo insufficient) warning dialog box on Google+.



Sources where I read about this problem include:


Use Google Takeout to Archive Your Images:

Also helpful, I didn't know until reading the final link above that Google offers a back up option called Google Takeout. You can archive and create back ups of the following Google data options:


I just backed up my Picasa albums. Five years of blog photos took less than 5 minutes to save.

Joining Google+

I joined and had no problems because I didn't delete or modify my Picasa account. So if you want to join Google+ and have the opportunity to, go ahead and join. Just don't delete your Picasa account or your Blogger albums that are kept there.

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