Blogger Changes Coming?

Just wondering, how many other bloggers also received this email from Google in recent days?

Hi XX
You’re receiving this email because you’ve viewed Album Archive recently or you may have some content that is visible in Album Archive. Starting on July 19, 2023, Album Archive will no longer be available. We recommend that you use Google Takeout to download a copy of your Album Archive data before then.

Today, Album Archive lets you view and manage album content from some Google products within Album Archive. However, some content that’s only available in Album Archive will be deleted starting July 19 including

1. Rare cases like small thumbnail photos and album comments or likes
2. Some Google Hangouts data from Album Archive
3. Background images uploaded in the Gmail theme picker prior to 2018

If you would like to access this data, please make a copy of this data using Google Takeout. After Album Archive is no longer available, you can still use those Google products to view and manage some content directly – learn more.

Thank you, Your Album Archive team

________________________________________

So — Does receipt of this email mean images in blog posts need to be exported very soon . . . so many ?s

This concern led to an hour or so of online sleuthing this weekend and then to the Blogger Help Community. The first post below by User 5777573509985063752 was labeled as a trending issue, as expected, it resulted in numerous comments from other Google users and replies from Adam, a Diamond Product Expert. (The user IDs are exactly as posted in the Help community.) Some of the longer comments have been shortened.

Blogger and Google Album Archive closing, where are Blogger photos stored?

Google Album Archive is closing in a few weeks. Just looked in there and it seems that’s where all Blogger pictures are stored. Does that mean on the 19th we won’t have any pictures on any of our blogger blogs? Or is that just a backup and the blog photos the blogs use are stored elsewhere?

Adam, Diamond Product Expert:

There are, understandably, a number of questions about this today, so I have merged them into this rollup thread. A new storage scheme is in the works. This transition is supposed to happen automatically; we'll see how that goes. Some images may need to be moved "manually," which means downloading them (if you need to) and uploading them again.

Google will notify you of any images that need manual action. Google clearly expects to be able to do this automatically for most images and has done that once before, when it moved Blogger images from Picasaweb into the Album Archive.

If you only need to download a small number of images, your browser probably has a "save image as" option. Otherwise, you can use Google Takeout. Beware of images uploaded from old accounts you may have forgotten about. Especially if the email of record for an old account is out of date (so that you will not see Google's notification).

We do not know today how clear the documentation from Google will be about describing affected images. It will probably be easier to replace things manually before the original image is deleted and it can be used as a marker and guide.

It may be too early to say "your blog isn't impacted by the changes." I just mean that I read that as "your blog isn't impacted by the changes" yet.  Apparently, a new storage scheme is in the works: https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/13656070

That said, a month's notice seems short for something like this.

User 9087340934809438:

Once archive is gone, and as Adam mentioned,  mostly no manual intervention by a blogger user is necessary (hopefully that is true as I also have thousands of photos embedded in the blog), where are the photos stored after that and against which storage quota does it count?

Adam, Diamond Product Expert:

Re: against which storage quota does it count?

That's an awfully good question, because the help page is silent on that issue.  I am going to cross my fingers and hope that the images won't count at all against storage, which is, after all, the status quo.

User 9353:

We should have an idea of what amount of broken links we have to expect. I have uploaded over 5,000 photos on my blog since 2013. Even if a small percentage of these pictures need manual intervention, that will take a lot of time to fix it.

User 12992456061150136430:

Similarly to 9353 I have thousands of photos that are ostensibly in the Album Archive and are linked in blog entries dating back to 2004. I have over 11,00 blog entries and any requirement for manual intervention is a non-starter.

Adam, Diamond Product Expert:

@9353, my suggestion is not to buy trouble in advance. I think Google expects to convert everything automatically and that failures will be rare.

We don't have information about what factors might be problematic for Google, and I suspect they do not know either, that they are preparing for the possibility that issues will emerge during implementation.

I suppose, and this is just my speculation, that it would be a good idea to "future proof" your blog, especially if it is very old.  What I mean is that if you started your blog before 2007 and never converted it to a Google account, it might be wise to do that.

Google says: Where possible, old image URLs on your blog are now converted to the new format. There may be some images where we can’t move to the new format automatically. 

I assume the tense this is written in may not yet be correct, that the conversion has not happened yet for many people. It hasn't for me.

There's no mention of any of that in the email that Google sent out to everybody with images in the Album Archive. The Archive includes images from many other sources besides Blogger, and the generic email did not enumerate every case.

User 1891572831468108221:

This would be great if Google were mentioning that blogger photos will be migrated automatically before asking the users to archive the images.

User JP1234567890;

Thanks for this summary, Adam. The blog I'm most concerned about is 17 years old with thousands of photos. For now I'm trying to decide if I have a huge job ahead. The thing I don't understand is in the document you linked to, "a new storage scheme is in the works: https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/13656070 

It ends by saying: "Tip: If the link isn’t visible, your blog isn’t impacted by the changes."

My question is which link. Does this mean that, in Step 4: Navigate to Manage blog > Manage unsupported image URLs.

If there is no "Manage unsupported image URLs" link underneath Manage blog,  does it mean my blog isn't impacted by the changes?

As shown in the above exchanges, this is an issue concerning many Google users and bloggers, myself included. It seems that not even a product expert can anticipate what will happen. 

Mt situation (and maybe yours) is like the users above who commented about long-running blogs with lots of images. Our blog has been going for just over a dozen years with most likely thousands of images.

That said, I am not planning to export any images, but will adopt a wait and see what happens next position. If that means that images are deleted from the blog by mid-July, perhaps that could be the time to shut it down. Should that happen, know that meeting blogger friends online (and some in person) has been wonderful. Meanwhile, I will be just waiting to see what happens.

Your turn — if you've received this email — What action, if any, do you plan to take?