Names restored to Blogger images

SOME GOOD NEWS, FOR ONCE

Your image gets a name

Blogger has added filenames to the urls for images that are uploaded into the blog or imported from Google Photos.

This should resolve a number of problems that bloggers have reported about how these images are (and aren't) showing up in blogs.

The change has been rolling out for several months and may not yet be in effect for everyone.

It started last summer

Blogger began a similarly slow rollout last summer of a new online scheme for images. 

That change has probably reached everyone by now, but perhaps there are yet a few holdouts.

The new schema broke a number of features supported by Google, such as lightbox and dynamic blog themes. 

It also affected how images are displayed in many third-party themes.

Google's approach so far has been to fix the features that are internal to Blogger, but not the third-party scripts used in some themes you can get or buy online. (Google themes are free.)

It is possible that by adding the file name to the end of the web address for the image, Google has resolved many of the issues experienced in third-party themes and apps. 

No guarantee, though.

Also, none of these changes are retroactive. No image urls for uploaded images have changed.

Fun fact: images imported into Blogger from Google Photos are actually duplicated, with a copy added to the Album Archive. 

That is why they get these new urls, too.

Also, search engines

According to Google, filenames are also used by Googlebot, the web crawler for Google Search, to identify and classify images. 

Adding the file names back restores this functionality as well.

The past two years have been particularly miserable ones for bloggers on this platform, with many features removed or broken, and some changes that are largely unwelcome. 

So it is great to see this getting fixed (though some problems may remain).

Timeline

• August: new urls appear for images
• by January: Some issues are fixed, but many are not
• March (ish): urls with filenames (including extensions like .jpg and .png) start to show up

The image in this blog is in the public domain.