If you use Blogger.com for creating your blog, and you upload photos from your computer – that creates a Picasa Web Album.
DO NOT delete that web album with the orange Blogger logo!
People have made this mistake. They’ve been browsing their Picasa Web Albums and see an album they don’t remember creating. Thinking it was time to clean up, they deleted the album. Next time they took a look at their blog, they saw lots of red x’s where the pictures should be.
There’s no way to get the pictures back!
Even if you know what pictures they were, and you re-upload them to a web album using Picasa on your computer – they will be in a different location, a different URL than the original album. That means that the references to the pictures in your blog will not be correct. You would need to edit each post and re-insert the images from the new Web Album.
It Gets Worse!
My standard method for adding pictures to a blog post is this:
- Using Picasa on my computer, I select the best pictures and Share them online. They are now located in a Picasa Web Album / Google+ Photos Album (see this post for PWA vs G+) in an album which I named.
- Using Blogger, I click the Insert Image button and select “From Picasa Web Albums” (which is the same thing as Google+ Photos.)
Using this method, I don’t even get the little orange Blogger logo to alert me that there are pictures being used in my Blog. I just tested this and deleted a photo from my Renaissance Faire Web Album that I knew was being used in a blog post. I got NO WARNING! I thought for sure I would see “This photo is used in a Blogger Blog post, are you sure you want to delete?” In fact, I could swear I’ve seen a message like that in the past. Either they’ve changed it … or I’m dreaming, because it deleted the picture quick as could be without so much as a how do you do!
When I went to the blog post where the picture was used, here is what I saw. A gray oval with a white dash where the picture should have been. To fix it, I had to re-share the photo from my computer to the Renaissance Faire Web Album, then edit the blog post and re-insert it.
Lesson to Learn
The only way to prevent this is to never delete photos from your web albums! It’s that simple – just Don’t Delete! I hope none of you have to learn this the hard way. I expect better from Google.
This tip brought to you by Geeks on Tour
Geeks on Tour is a membership website with hundreds of Tutorial Videos on topics of interest to travelers, such as managing digital photos with Picasa, using Android Smartphones, Route-Planning with Streets and Trips, and sharing your travels with a website using Blogger or with friends on Facebook. You can subscribe to our free e-newsletters, or become a paid member and be able to view all of the videos in the Learning Library.