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Blogger Post Editor, And Photos Hosted Under Picasa

Many blog owners are unsure about the hosting of photos, as published to our Blogger blogs, under Google. We see innocent questions like
What happens if I delete my Google account?
and slightly frustrated questions
The photos on my blog disappeared!
and agony
I had my Google account, and my blog, restored - but my photos are still missing!!
These are examples of real life questions, posted in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken. These questions identify issues that need to be explored.


If you publish a page / post in your blog - or in someone else's team blog - and you add a photo to your page / post, uploaded using the "Insert image" wizard, the photo content is hosted in a Picasa account that is attached to your Google account. If you transfer control of the blog, or cease membership in a team blog, your pages and posts remain as a part of the blog. Any photos uploaded using Page / Post Editor remain, hosted in your Picasa account.

Your Picasa account is attached to your Google account, for eternity. If you delete your Google account, your Blogger, Orkut, Picasa, and other accounts are deleted - and all content of those accounts goes away, also. If your blog is part of a team membership, your published posts remain - but any photos, hosted under your Picasa account, are gone. If you setup a Google+ account, and do not heed the warnings, the photos will be deleted - and will disappear from the blog.

If you delete your Google account, but retain the right authentication accounts afterward, it is possible to recover (not recreate!) the Google account. If you do this properly, your Blogger account, and all blogs owned under that account (within limits), can be recovered also.

Unfortunately, Picasa accounts do not provide a similar option. Even with your Google account restored, your Picasa account, and all photos hosted in the account, are not recoverable. That's the sad detail, which is discovered too late, by too many blog owners, and team members.

You can transfer control of your Blogger blog(s), from one Google account to another - but your Picasa account containing hosted photos remains as part of the original Google account, for eternity, or until the Google account is deleted.

For that reason, we continually advise people to never, ever, delete their Google account - if any photos were ever published under the associated Blogger account.

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Comments

Lori E said…
That is great advice. Thanks.
Michele Garcia said…
I successfully transferred the ownership/admin of my blogs under a non-gmail google account to a newer gmail google account. I see that you advise to not delete the old google account because photos uploaded with blogger's post editor will not be transferred as they are stored in Picasa from the old account and forever associated with that account. If I wanted to go through the trouble of re-uploading the photos to each post while logged into blogger under my new gmail google account, will that associate the photos with my new gmail google account and allow me to delete the old non-gmail google account?
Nitecruzr said…
Michele,

If you upload the photos again, under your new account, then you'll have a new set of photos. If you make sure that only the URLs of the new photos are referenced, in all posts in all blogs, then you can delete the old Blogger / Google account, without causing a problem.

You just have to be very careful not to leave references to the old Photo URLs.

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