'New Blogger' Photos: Reports from the Trenches

The new, responsive user interface for Blogger's back end is due to become mandatory next month. 

Meanwhile, in Blogger's lively, if sometimes frustrating, help community, users are expressing a river of objections, frustrations, and problems.

The three most common pain points are in the new post editor.

Issues include photos, labels, and (for blogs with many posts) infinite scroll.

Many complaints and requests are of the "I can't find it" variety. Familiar controls have been moved or restyled.

This can be frustrating, but if it is just a question of having to learn new tricks, I think we will all just have to do that. 

The issues I describe below, however, seem to go beyond the mere familiarity of the legacy interface.

Photos

In theory, The New Blogger retains all of the functionality of the legacy UI for images and videos.

There are controls to upload from your device, from your album archive (including one for your blog), and from anyplace on the internet.

You have the same sizing and alignment options, and can add a caption and metadata to images. 

I was able to upload, size, orient, and mark up the above photo in TNB without difficulty. (I declined to add a caption, but I could have)

In practice, right now many are reporting a serious unresolved problem with the option to add an image "by URL" (using the web address of the image).

Instead of inserting the selected image url, TNB is using a Google url that is invalid. After a short period, the image vanishes from the blog post.

(Here's another set of reports, among other issues.)

In addition to this:

• Bloggers are unable to copy and paste from posts
• Drag and drop insertion of images seems to have dropped away

There are a number of other issues that seem to have been resolved, so these might be too. 

There are yet other issues that do not seem related to the new UI.

Too many keystrokes

I'll add this: there are a number of interface changes that I think are, objectively, for the worse. 

It takes more keystrokes or clicks to make a hyperlink, for instance, and the icons on the toolbar in the editor could use a lot of design work.

I've left feedback about them, but don't have a whole lot of hope.

What is to be done?

Leave feedback for the developers.

They need to hear from us. And now is the time to do it.

Once The New Blogger becomes "The Only Blogger," it will probably be too late.

The above photo is in the public domain.