All clear to "drag and drop?"

For a long time the practice of dragging images into Blogger's post editor often led to problems, or failed outright.

But dragging may be a handy (and safe) way to reinsert images into posts, by dragging from published posts.

At least for now.

Previously

Sometimes dragging images into posts created Base64 images that slowed and deformed the blog.

Sometimes dropped pictures mischievously vanished hours or days after publication, or caused other problems.

I went from describing this feature to advising fellow bloggers to stay away from it.

But today, if you are willing to take a chance, it looks as though dragging from an existing blog post is a quick and stable way to copy an image you have already published.

Drag, drop, wait, format, and done!

You may need to reformat the image, but in my recent experience dragging from a published post or page preserves the full file name and metadata.

To be safe, don't drag and drop, or copy and paste, from your desktop or any offline documents. Use the Upload tool to add unpublished images.

At any rate, that is what I am doing, and not doing, these days.

Media Manager

Of course you can already reinsert images using the Media Manager, which you can access from the Insert Image tool (from "Blogger").

But the Media Manager is poorly organized and not searchable. If you have many images, it's hard to locate the right one. Finding the post with the image you want to reuse is often easier.

You could also just reinsert the image via upload, since image storage on Blogger is free and unlimited. But if you have a lot of images, that also adds to the clutter.

Both of those methods will require you to recreate metadata, like Alt text, if you use them (and you should.)

Experience

I've been using drag-and-drop from published posts for the past few months without a hitch. I find it very useful.

The code this process writes (visible in HTML mode) is of standard form, and the image URLs are the same as those of the images as originally inserted.

As of this writing, dragging images from my desktop, or pasting from a document, also mostly succeeds, in that the images appear. Success!

Also, the images are added to the Media Manager, with perfectly normal URLs.

However, the image URLs in the blog post are nonstandard, and I worry that they may not persist. 

Also, those URLs do not include the file name, which is useful if you are editing a post in HTML mode. (They help to identify the code string for the image.)

The same goes for pasting images.

For this reason, I won't be using those methods to import new images into my blogs.

Technical note

The format for a standard, stable image URL is, roughly,

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/[long character string]/[formatting parameters]/[file name].[file type]

where "formatting parameters" might be, for instance, "/s16000/," and file name + type something like "/WWI_peeking.jpeg."

The images inserted by dragging or pasting from desktop or document have URLs like this:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/[long character string]

They are in a different "bin" ("/a/," not "/b/") and the "long character string" is different than the one for the same image in the Media Manager.

(Some of the stable images on my blog also take the /a/ form, so maybe that doesn't matter. Maybe none of it does, and these will also persist. I prefer the certainty, and utility, of the file-name version.)

It is interesting to see that those images are uploaded correctly into Media Manager, with longer, standard URLs.

Maybe someday Google will straighten things out to insert that version into blog posts too.

Dragon drop

If you like the idea of dragging from published matter, and don't mind taking a small risk to use this undocumented feature, give it a try and let me know what you think in the comments.

Photo: Lt. Erne Brooks, 1916. Source: Imperial War Museums, London.