Blogger images: problems mount

Jef Poskanzer, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A recent back-end change for hosting Blogger images was supposed to be nearly invisible to us bloggers, and not any sort of big deal.

Instead, six months into the transition, there are clear issues that Google has not addressed.

Some may never be fixed.

What's new

Blogger puts your image uploads into your album archive, and that hasn't changed.

But internally, the images are now being assigned web addresses that are exceptionally long and do not reflect the file name of the image that was uploaded.

Update: As of March 2022, Google is rolling out file names as part of these new urls.

This has implications for how some blog themes and websites show those images, for search engine rank, and for your own blog administration.

Some blogs are only just seeing this now. Others have been experiencing it since the summer.

None of the older images are being transformed; this is a change going forward only.

My August 2021 report describes some of these differences.

The new web urls are not related to older issues placing images into blog posts.

A deeper dive

Going to get a little techy for a moment.

Here's one of the new image urls

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhp6dDv_cEGHZhdTIdSJzZZepPmmuw7hmEzt7cfIHGu0okmjHkhAXzeYg9hvUWmQkq5U0p_0HuzoWkpVD6W3uf127YfIYzqE67k2M5YDiaAMCR39fTVjqgPtd9MJCvbZjvnUktaEA1PR0Y43W6RXZoxsylg5I3VRQZjHZp57DIhBElItry2-5JFJ5r-=s800

and here is the old style

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6gBaMVfbDTQ/YLUi5DToT6I/AAAAAAAAFiE/z3MsbNV0PZgCZDS1Pg3tECdGd2dy9TJsQCLcBGAsYHQ/s500/focus-flow.jpg

The old-style url ends with "focus-flow.jpg." That reflects the file name of the image I uploaded into the blog, and the file type.

The switch to googleusercontent.com (from blogspot.com) doesn't seem to matter much to us bloggers. It does make the new urls easy to spot, though.

Note how the old image parameters have been relocated.

Search engines and the new order

There is a lot (I mean, a whole lot) of bad folklore on the internet about search-engine optimization, the arcane art of getting the search engines to feature your blog post. 

Mostly, you should ignore all that and focus on your user's experience. So, what are we to make of this claim:

The filename can give Google clues about the subject matter of the image. For example, my-new-black-kitten.jpg is better than IMG00023.JPG.

Of course, those clues are gone from the new urls.

Well, who says that, and why should we believe them? Turns out it is a little tech company called Google. 

The quote is from one of Google's help pages for web developers.

Also 

In a video, Google's John Mueller, similarly tells us,

Google uses the url path, as well as the file name, to help it understand your images (emphasis added).

He advises, 

Use a good url structure for your image files.

Sound advice. But how? Google controls that, not us.

Mueller is a senior webmaster trends analyst at Google, where he has worked since 2007. His quoted remarks in the video appear about 5:20 in.

The help page, and Muller's video, include plenty of other tips and explanations about how to tweak web architecture so that search engines like Google can make the most of your images in search.

But the promise of Blogger has always been that it will always be technically optimized for us—that we creative blogging types do not need to tinker with things like url structure.

And furthermore, in this case, we can't.

Human factors

Your focus should be on your readers, the "users" of your blog. But similarly, you are also a user, of Blogger.

You do not have to mess about with the underlying HTML of a blog post. But if you want to, or need too, you can.

If you are doing that kind of editing, it might be helpful to be able to identify the code blocks for each of your images.

You can't do that any more.

URLs with file names might also be helpful in troubleshooting situations (if an image won't load, for instance), though those are special cases.

Not invented here

Blogger has always welcomed third-party blog themes, and there are some attractive choices.

Some of these can't handle the new images well. 

Typically, in problem cases, there is a script to render thumbnails of post images on the home page. The script searches the image url for information (such as a file type).

Without that marker, the script might render the image as blurry, or miss it altogether.

Google has decided this is not their problem, and you can almost see their point. It's one thing to be open to third-party developers, another to take responsibility for compatibility with them.

Nonetheless, who gets stuck with the problem? Bloggers like us.

Telling Google

Google did fix problems when Google's Dynamic themes choked on the urls, and when lightbox (which features all the images in a post in a kind of slideshow) wouldn't show the new images.

Maybe they will address these other ones too. All they'd have to do is add the file name back into the web address. (Update: which they've done, for new uploads.)

The only option we have is to leave feedback for the developers.

This is rarely quick or satisfying, but it's what we've got.