Saturday, January 20, 2018

Where are my Blogger photos?


Google keeps your Blogger images "in the cloud," online. But where?

Blogger images did not make the switch to Google Photos when Google phased out Picasaweb, its original online photo album.

Instead Google created the Album Archive as a stripped-to-its-basics online repository for Blogger and other legacy images. 

Later, Blogger made those images available in its Media Manager, when Google phased out the Album Archive. View your images here.

Your blog has an album there. But what you can do with that album is extremely limited.

Blogger's insert image tool
Blogger's Insert Image tool stores the image in the Media Manager

Uploading an image into a blog post using the Insert Image tool stashes the image file online in a blog-specific album bearing the name of the blog.

Accounts with multiple blogs will have multiple blog albums.

Here are the important things you can do in the Archive:
  • View Album contents
  • Delete images and albums (which deletes them from your blog)
That's it! You can't edit the images or upload directly to the albums, or move images into different albums. You can't even search an album or change the sort order of images.

For your own peace of mind, don't think of this feature as an actual album that you can tweak and share. You can't!

Think of your blog's album as a kind of window into the place where Google (not you) stores the files you have uploaded to Blogger.

Google's full-featured online photo album, and its successor to Picasaweb, is Google Photos.

The Blogger media archive is just an archive.

More on the Media Manager

You can't open images from the Media Manager, so you can't download them from there as you could from the Album Archive.

You can still download individual images from a blog post, and (in bulk) from Google Takeout.

I still recommend keeping a file of all the images you upload, among other tips on managing photos for your blog.

You can't undo a deletion from the Media Manager, and if you do delete an image it will disappear for everyplace you use it in your blog.

Images there do not count against your storage allocation from Google.

This report was revised in July of 2023 to reflect the switch from the Album Archive to the Media Manager.

Links
Thank you to Palnatoke for making the above archive image available under a Creative Commons license.

12 comments:

  1. Strange... there should be over 160 pictures in my Album Archive, but there are only about 20 pics. So, I still don't know where my pictures are. But that doesn't matter anymore since you can not manage them. I don't like this from Google.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. View, download, delete—that's it. But Google Photos has all the usual bells and whistles for an online photo album.

      As for your missing photos: are you aware that each blog has its own folder? There is also the possibility that some of them were uploaded from another account (so would be in that account's albums).

      Delete
  2. My pictures are there in the Album Archive, and I see them in the Blogger Insert Image window, but they have disappeared (most, not all, and not the very latest ones posted yesterday) in the actual blog page, replaced by a graphic that looks like a minus sign in an oval.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Halekini,

      This looks like a job for the Blogger Help Community!

      When you post there, be sure to include a link to a blog post that illustrates the problem.

      Delete
  3. And do you know how to see all the videos uploaded to blogger? and of course how to download it

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That depends on when you added the video, and what system. To be honest, I do not think I could answer in every one of those cases.

      If you are having a problem with this, I encourage you to take it to the Blogger Help Community.

      Delete
  4. hi bro,
    can i download the whole folder for it? i mean for my blog?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. @Ashikur, I recommend using Google Takeout for batch downloads.

      Delete
    2. Would you explain how to do that? I would like to download all my old Picasa pictures from the archive. Thanks!

      Delete
    3. @VK, go to the link I provide upthread and follow the instructions.

      Delete
  5. But why can't I upload image directly from my computer or phone files

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. @Robert, sorry you are having a problem! This sounds like a job for the Blogger help community (link in sidebar).

      Delete