Photos in Blogger changing under the hood

Photo: Justinite

Place an image in Blogger and, lately, it is not always clear what will happen.

There have been a lot of issues recently in the help community about images. That's often a sign that the Blogger developers are tinkering.

This week we are seeing evidence of a change in the wiring.

The changes should not affect how things work from our point of view.

Update: And yet, there are persistent problems with the new image urls a half year in.

New and similar

Images imported into Blogger from the post (or page) editor are now being stored at urls that begin at a new blogger subdomain at the googleusercontent.com domain.

Blogger still stashes these images in the Album Archive, just as it did before.

You should see this web address for images that you add to your blog with the Insert Image tool on the editing toolbar and these options:

• Upload
• Blogger
• Photos

The options will create a copy of the image file at the new url and in the Album Archive with your other Blogger photos. Even the "Photos" option makes a copy of the original "Photos" file, separate and unlinked.

Note that since I wrote my tutorials on images in Blogger, the user interface has changed, and the screen shots no longer match what you will actually see. 

The information is still basically correct, however, except as noted, and the changes do not diverge too much from what came before.

Blogger image url trivia night

"blogger.googleusercontent.com" is the new subdomain for blogger images.

It should work just the same as the old web address, which began with 1 (or other number) .bp.blogspot.com.

Once upon a time, Blogger stashed its images at photos1.blogger.com. These are pretty old! but (a) still out there and (2) still good.

Some of the graphics that Google uses in its Blogger themes are at themes.googleusercontent.com.

Problematic uploads

Nonstandard ways of adding images, such as copy and paste and drag and drop, can put the image on an "lh" subdomain at googleusercontent.com (such as "lh3.googleusercontent.com"). 

These are often unstable, in some cases vanishing after a short period.

The "by url" option mostly does what it says, and can be used to insert images from non-Google sources such as Flickr or other hosting services.

However, if you use "by url" on a Google Photos image the result will be unstable, at least for photos in an account that is different from the one that holds the blog. 

For now, stay away from "from url" for Photos files, and from copy and paste or drag and drop, though perhaps these will get fixed.

What why

Mysterious the ways of the Google are. But this puts all Blogger photos, going forward, on the Blogger domain. That is the same domain as your dashboard.

Possibly this will avoid future problems or even make new functionality possible at some point.

If so, I hope Google will find some way to take the older photos along too.

Update: Six months later, there are persistent problems with the new urls.