Managing photos for your blog

The internet is a great medium for photos. Blogging visually creates posts with greater impact and sticking power.

BEATRICE MURCH PHOTO

Uploading a photo to Blogger will create at least two, and sometimes three, separate copies.

Should you keep track of them? And how?

Here's how I do it.

First, though: Do you usually just upload your photos straight to Blogger? I always use a copy that has been stepped down to a lower resolution, and here's why.

Low-resolution images are perfect for Blogger, load faster, and take up less space on my hard drive.

Update: Google now stores Blogger photos in a Media Manager album for each blog. Also, Blogger will reduce the size of some large images on upload.

But as you've probably realized, that makes another copy of each photo: a low-res version.

You don't want to lose or confuse these copies. Here's how I keep it all straight.

Copies copies copies

So far you should be making three copies of every photo that you blog:

1. Your original full-resolution photo, stored on your computer
2. A low-res version, also on your computer
3. The copy of the low-res version hosted in Blogger's Media Manager that your blog will actually use.

Blogger may scale down the Media Manager copy on upload.

For me, the process starts when my computer sucks the photos from my camera, or I download it from the cloud.

I use Apple Photos, which comes bundled with my Macintosh, but other photo-management software does the same things.

The key photo-management features that you need are as follows:

• Imports photographs from your camera or cloud

• Organizes the photos (so that you can group all blog photos together)

• Exports photos at a resolution and file name that you specify.

Photo-album programs typically do much more than the above. Many let you crop and retouch the photos and are integrated with various social-networking programs.

This blog post is not a short course in using all those features or in how to use any particular software application. It's just an inventory of what to do with whatever program you've got.

Download from camera or cloud to computer

If I've taken multiple shots I pick the best one and delete the ones I am sure not to use. I often edit the photo, at least to the extent of cropping it.

Organize the photo in photo-album program

Then I (1) give it a descriptive name and (2) tag it as a blog photo. Apple Photos lets me do that with a keyword, but I could also put it in an album for blog photos.

Both methods are common. The point is to give this treatment to every photo that I actually use, and only to those photos.

(My other blog, which uses a good number of photos, is about apples. So I tag every photo that I use with "apples," which puts them in an "apples" smart folder.)

Export photo to hard drive

Then I export the photo from the photo album to my hard drive, with the name I have given it and at a resolution of 1100 pixels or less. I keep my photos in a blog folder in my photos folder.

The original photo file might have a name like IMC_2879.jpg and a size of 3 or 10 MB. The new one will have a descriptive name such as McIntosh.jpg and might be 300 kb or so.

The original will be squirreled away in a set of directories used only by my photo-album program. The smaller copy will be in a user-friendly directory named "apple blog" with all my other blog photos.

Upload photo to blog

The last step is to upload the photo—the low-res version—from my computer to my blog, using Blogger's post-editing window.

If you do this, over time you will have triple redundant backup of all your blog photos, as follows:

1. All your low-res photos in a single album online at Picasaweb, each with the descriptive names you have selected.
2. The same on your computer in the folder you set up
3. The original, high-resolution versions in your photo-album program, should you ever need to print a copy of an image or do anything else with it.

In 2025, Google introduced a new version of Blogger backup that includes all uploaded photos. I don't need a fourth copy, but perhaps they'd be useful in a different workflow.

Speaking of backups: My regular computer backups include these photos. Whew!