Monday, March 13, 2023

Modern image manager debuts

19th century illustration of a gentleman using an electronic apparatus to view an image of a woman.

Google stashes the images you upload into your blog in the Album Archive, their online home that is separate from Google Photos.

Now, Google has written a new back end for those images, available today at www.blogger.com/mediamanager.

There's a link to it from your Settings page (in the "Manage Blog" section).

Though not a big change, the new user interface is more like that of the rest of Google, with a hide-able left sidebar that, alas, is just for navigation. 

A fresh coat of paint

There are no new features on the sidebar, such as search or sort, and the functionality remains very basic: you can view and delete images.

Google Photos this is not.

However, the default sort order here is newest-first, so you don't have to scroll all the way to the end to find recent images.

Also, you can select multiple images and delete them all at once.

As with the Album Archive, there is no undo for deletions. So, be careful!

Information about each photo is still available on hover. Download remains available by opening any image + right-click (Windows) or control-click (Mac), or by pressing on your phone or tablet.

The Album Archive is still live, too.

For now, anyway.

Links

Today's fanciful illustration is one of many created in the late 19th century by Françoise Foliot for a series entitled "En L'An 2000" ("In the Year 2000"). It has passed into the public domain.

7 comments:

  1. Thank dog! It is long past due.

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  2. Thank you adam, we are now patiently waiting for more advanced features from Blogger.

    Now we've got instant indexing for all articles.

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    Replies
    1. I have been waiting for a good long time!

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  3. Somewhere along the way, you wrote a post about the interaction between this Media Manager / Album Archive. I am unable to find it again. I thought you had discussed what happens if you delete a blog. Currently, I am merging two blogs through the export/import functionality. Understanding that the images will still reference their original storage location, I am curious to know if that original storage location will persist after deleting the associated blog. Any insight you can offer is welcome. Copilot says I am all good, but you seem to have a little more expertise than that AI. ;)

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    1. I am not sure that I ever addressed this question exactly, but I think that the images will persist even if the blog is deleted.

      It should be pretty easy to test that: create a test blog, upload a test image, delete the test blog, and then see if the image persists in the Media manager.

      There is a problem if you transfer a blog to another account and then delete the original account—that will delete images uploaded from that account.

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    2. Hey! Thanks for the response. That was my next path. Copilot says it the "gallery" in Media manager should stick after the blog is deleted, but since you have kind of become the resident expert, thought I would ask. Will let you know if I observe a different reaction.

      Delete
    3. Copilot? Trust, but verify.

      Actually I just tested this and it appears to persist, as expected.

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