The Real Blogger Status

We have a few blog owners, reporting problems with sharing their blogs to FaceBook. When I share my blog on FaceBook, the photo from the blog doesn't appear. Some blurry pencil appears instead. What the blog owner is seeing, is the effect of the FaceBook Share wizard, grabbing an unwanted photo, from the page being shared. You have 2 choices, if you want to share blog content to FaceBook - and have it all look attractive. Publish every post, containing a photo that FaceBook will want to use. Add FaceBook Open Graph code, to your blog.

One of the painful experiences, with Blogger blogs, involves people who make blogs based on photo albums. Photos are, historically, a cherished souvenir of lifes passages - even in this modern age where a dozen photos might be taken, as opposed to one or two, 20 to 30 years ago. Sometimes, the souvenirs, part of a Blogger blog, are lost. Even if deleted photos can be restored, a blog may have to be rebuilt - one photo at a time. When restored, photos frequently have a different URL - and the code in the blog post must be updated, to reflect the new URL. For many blog owners, it is simpler to just upload each photo again.

Last month, Blogger launched an improved Page / Post Editor image uploader - Image Drag and Drop . Today, we are happy to announce that users will be able to drag and drop images directly into posts drafts. In the past, users had to click on “Insert image” to upload the file from the posts drafts. However, with the new drag and drop feature, users will have an easier way to add pictures into post drafts. Like many Blogger major improvements, this one comes with challenges.

We see occasional signs of concern, in Blogger Help Forum: Get Help with an Issue , about photo quality in Blogger. I take high quality pictures with my camera - and when I edit them, using various platforms, they still have the same quality. But the second I upload them to my Blogger post, the quality gets really bad. This is a very civilised comment, not all are so objective. Photo quality has been a concern, for years. There are so many ways photos can be degraded, once they hit the Internet.

We see some blog owners reporting loss of photos, when used in their blogs, and added using Post Editor. Some blog owners take photos using their camera / phone, upload them to Google+ Photos, and publish their blog posts. Having published their post, they remove the photos from their phones, to save storage space. And once deleted from their cameras / phones, their photos vanish from their blog .

We've had some photo / video blogs under review recently, and confirmed as TOS Violations. The citations were first seen late last year, and associated with the "Jennifer Lawrence" / "Anna Kendrick" celebrity leak photos scandal . We're asking Blogger Support for details of the policy - but right now it appears that Google is now forbidding any "nude celebrity" photos or videos, after their public relations problems surrounding the Jennifer Lawrence photos.

We're seeing a few questions about photo quality, from blog owners using Picasa photo hosting. Why do my photos look brighter? and Why has the background colours on my pictures changed? The recently added Google+ "Auto Enhance" and "Auto Awesome" features do not appear to be painless, for some blog owners. If you have a Google+ account, check out the Settings - Photos section. You'll find two recent additions. Auto Enhance Automatically enhance new photos Learn more Auto Awesome Create awesome new images from photos in your library Learn more Interestingly, these settings appear to be enabled automatically for some blogs, without warning to the owners - including a few blogs that are not associated with a Google+ profile.

For some time, blog owners would note mysterious problems with photos on their blogs, in various ways - depending upon the browser in use . Some blog owners and readers would report a mysterious red "X", others a big, blank space - and still others would see nothing at all, not even a space. The only common symptom would be My pictures have vanished! Recently, photos hosted under Picasa changed that vague symptom, by displaying two "place holder" icons, depending upon either of two commonly diagnosed problems which had caused the missing photos.

We see occasional reports of problems with photo orientation, from various blog owners posting in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken . Why are my photos displayed horizontal, when they should be vertical? Presumably, if someone's photo was taken with her standing, the blog owner does not want the photo showing her lying on her side.

During the past few days, we're seeing a few reports in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , from owners of blogs that use an image in the header, instead of or in addition to, plain text, claiming changes in the appearance of the header. The exact problem report varies - that the image has been resized, has shifted in position, has become pixelated, or has simply disappeared.

As Blogger blog owner interest in Google+ grows, we're seeing occasional reports in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken , about problems involving photo hosting and Picasa. Some Blogger blog owners, who have previously uploaded images or photos in post editor, setup their Google+ accounts, and notice that their photos are disappearing. I just setup Google+, and now all of my photos are gone from my blog!

Last week, we explored a problem with photos not displaying properly in the blog . A few blog owners have noted the published fix Edit the post HTML and remove all "height = 0" and "width = 0" attributes. Recently, we're seeing suggestions that the above suggestion helps - but not always. I looked at another post that said to manually remove the height and width = 0 tag from Edit HTML tab of the new post editor, but that has not solved the problem. Looking at the HTML in some blogs, we can see another, similarly interesting detail. Here's an example. <a href=" https :https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvDrBkec8w7oKGmhyphenhyphen7b8iJrpXHZ7FyVdQw_GnKJodvnLxXytwAhu-rNeg9MXbSvpBBvsNtzcji4D5W7OM4AViBY8TBQE2233dvt49Y_eSIGYtJ5z35qGb-7d7J5zof57GBGAkW/s1600/DSC_3337.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img r6="true" src=" https :https://blogger.googleuser...

Several blog owners, today, have reported that recently published posts containing photos show a blank space, or a tiny box, where some photo thumbnails should be displayed, when the blog posts are displayed in the browser. When using various browser analytical tools, such as the Firefox "Page Info" wizard, the thumbnails in question appear to be downloaded properly to the browser cache - they simply are not showing up, in the blog display. Examination of HTML code, for the problem photos, in Post Editor "Edit HTML" mode, reveals odd snippets of code. Here's code from one reported problem. <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyfEGyjXnQUKhhQNXdJXzKsKVdaXKX7cwSXca4e4n3koMMr0XJ5V6tM2vv167L6lO-eN_slKc7L4XL4EGvfVGqp9KxOfzpy5pjkoomo93HZUmYv4uEcJOEECFiRDZfBv9xqVkfdA/s1600/IMG_2598.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="0" ...

Every week, we see the naive query How do I prevent my pictures from being copied? and this, I regret to say, is a magic trick that has yet to be perfected. Others ask Why does Google let people publish blogs with pictures stolen from other blogs? and here, we have to note that Google has no interest in controlling blog content, beyond the limits of their own TOS regulations .

Does your blog use Inline (Embedded Below Post) Comments? Do you have any posts with more than 5 comments? I have a few. New Blogger Limits 2009 - Labels, Again Missing Followers - September 2009 - The Good News, And The Bad News Missing Followers - September 2009 The New Post Editor And Spell Checking The New Post Editor Is Here Notice anything odd there? The first 4 or 5 comments, which were made by commenters who have pictures, show the pictures. After that, no pictures. I wonder what other surprises are in store for us this week? >> Top