Friday, August 20, 2021

Photos in Blogger changing under the hood

Hands soldering on a circuit board
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:

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.


9 comments:

  1. I copied and pasted blogs into an archive here, and found that when the website that I was trying to save the blogs from closed, all of the photos were lost, because they were never copied and pasted, only the address to them on the other website, which was closing. No one told me that would happen! People should know! People should know that you aren't actually copying that photo, only the URL to the photo. It's so frustrating!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. So you know, almost every copy/ paste of images into web contents works that way. Avoid all costs.

      Delete
    2. There are many good reasons to avoid copy-paste in Blogger in particular.

      Delete
  2. hello sir
    This is my website
    i need image url with extention for javascript varieble

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hello Mr Laboratory,

      You'll have to talk to Google about that! Or rewrite your script.

      There is nothing I can do.

      Delete
  3. May I ask how you checked it? How search engines other than Google, such as Bing, work with new non-SEO urls

    ReplyDelete
  4. This change is creating weird problems. I don't understand why Google had to strip the filename and extension with its domain change for the photos!

    The filenames were an important part of SEO and the extension-less URLs are now not being recognized as image URLs by some websites, e.g. feedly.

    https://www.mugofmuse.com/2021/09/4-yellow-flowers.html is the last post on my blog with the older image URL (https://1.bp.blogspot.com/) and its the last post that shows a thumbnail in my blog feed!

    The subsequent posts even stopped showing the thumbnails on Whatsapp shares, but I was finally able to fix that at least by changing the images to "Original Size" on all those posts.

    But no matter what I do, I can't get the thumbnails to show on my blog feed in feedly. And no thumbnail image means lost eyeballs!

    And I have no idea yet how it will affect my blog SEO.

    Seriously! Couldn't they just change the domain name, but KEEP the filename and the extension?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hello Adam.

    Thanks for this update, but now it looks like we've got them back to our sites.

    All images now can gave name extension.

    I like ya blog.

    ReplyDelete