Thursday, December 04, 2008

The case of the disappearing pictures


I need the aid of a blog detective to find my missing pictures. I have been looking through my blog archives and find that quite a number of past posts have lost one or more of the photographs that were featured in them. Any clues?

25 comments:

  1. Also, if the pictures are visible on the blog, right click and save them to the HD again. Blogger has been driving me crazy, so I spend a lot of time redoing what I thought I'd already done.

    BTW - I don't know if I told you, my local muckraker blog was hacked and deleted. When I was able to reconstruct most of it under in a new blog name (talk about a lot of busy work), it was hacked a second time, but we're up and running again. Apparently we are getting a little too close for the comfort of the local junta.

    My wrinkled little fingers are weary to the bone. Thank God for laptops or I would never have attempted it.

    Good look in finding your pictures.

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  2. e, I have spent quite a lot of time trying to find the missing pictures. I have them all saved and could upload them to the posts again but I am intrigued about how and why they have disappeared. I'll try replacing just one and see if that is affected again.

    Sorry to hear about your blogjackings. I didn't know one could do such things.

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  4. If your original pictures still exist, they will be in your Picasa picture album. To reach that, go to Google, then sign in to your Google account (top right) using the same login as your blog. Now select 'My Account' (top right again) and you will see a list of your 'products'. Now select 'Picasa Web Albums' and your photos will hopefully still be there. Each photo offers an 'Embed image' option via 'Link to this Photo'. Copy this and insert it back into the html version of the post (just like you embedded the YouTube video of Bagpuss).

    Sometimes photos disappear because they're not ones you uploaded but ones that have been embedded from other sites; then they disappear if the original gets taken down.

    If you suspect your account has been 'hacked' (I somewhat doubt it, since you'd probably have lost a lot more), you must change your password. I find an easy way of creating a secure password is to use the registration number of the oldest car you remember, add its make and then a star, eg ABC123Dmorris*. I defy any software to crack that too easily.

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  5. Stephen, thanks for that but the mystery remains. I have the original pictures both in the Picasa album and in my own picture files. What I don't understand is why the posts in question show a frame where the pictures should be and if I click on that, I get a jpg reference number. Where have the pictures gone? As far as I can see they are family pictures e.g. on the post called The Epidemiologist, the cartoon of my father-in-law and the family in Africa has disappeared. I have re-inserted it to see what happens. Similarly a photograph has disappeared from a post I did about my late sister. I am puzzled as to how or why they have gone.

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  6. Broken links happen a lot to me, especially links to websites on the internet. It doesn't happen very often when the link is to something on my own computer. I believe it's the vagaries of Blogger and the price we pay for a free blog host. As long as you haven't actually lost anything, it's fixable.

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  7. I do not use the Blogger, but have put several photos on a picasaweb. It used to work perfectly, but somewhere from November 2008 I experience that the photos are disappearing. Around 15-20 % of them have gone and there are still placeholders for them. Even the titles below the pictures still exist, but not the photos. I'm disappointed, too.

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  8. Hello al, I have noticed that more pictures have disappeared recently from my blog archive but they are still in the Picasa album. It remains a mystery.

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  9. I found this conversation by Googling "photos disappearing from blogspot." It's almost 7 months later, & I'm experiencing the phenomenon of images disappearing from my blog, sometimes repeatedly. I just tried Stephen's suggestion and was able to 'embed' the pictures from my web album.
    Hope they stay put this time!!

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  10. Hi Sandi
    I haven't had any more pictures go missing (tempting fate there!) but I have heard that some people can actually see the original as well as the second one I have inserted on some posts. Stephens advice was very helpful but I still haven't seen an explanation for the disappearance. I hope you don't have any more problems.

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  11. I suspect that anyone seeing two images are recovering the original from the internet cache on their hard-drive. I'm presuming you did actually remove the html for the original pictures from your posts?

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  12. Hello Stephen
    I think I have done them all now but I get the occasional email about one that I've missed. I haven't been through all the archived posts so there could be a few with missing pictures or some where I inserted a replacement before you told me to delete the HTML.

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  13. There is at least an explanation for why it happens, which Google (and many others) have spent considerable time investigating.

    The explanation is I'm afraid somewhat technical but I'll try. The internet relies on a Domain Name System (DNS) for making the correct connections between (at the base level) individual IP addresses. Many sites have more than one domain e.g. blogger.com and blogger.net.

    Because of the scale of the Google operation, they have their own internal DNS, and problems arise when they temporarily shut down a particular storage area for servicing because that internal DNS gets disrupted, and doesn't fully restore when the storage comes back on. Depending on one's route into the Google structure, the DNS may or may not work correctly, leaving some people having working picture links, others not.

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    1. that was incredibly well explained. #StephenForPresident

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  14. Thank you for that, Stephen. I'm sure you have simplified it greatly so that I can follow it and I do!

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  15. Hi- Thanks for the replies, especially for the explanation about why the photos disappear...I don't really know HTML, so I wasn't sure about deleting what's in there for the original images. Couldn't tell where the image HTML left off and the text HTML started...I had done all my (family history) posting from GMail, so that I would have copies of what I wrote.
    Also, I appreciate your help because I posted a question on Blogger Help, but there haven't been any informed responses! I put a link to your blog page on there for the person who was having the same problem. :)

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  16. Hey, my little profile picture is the one that disappears most often. For the Blogger profile photo, seemingly the Embed method won't work; I've tried it twice. If I re-load if from my computer, then there about 5 copies that show up in that web album. Oh, well-

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  17. Sandi
    I am glad that this has been of help, although credit goes to Stephen and not to me! He has an excellent computing blog with all kinds of advice here: http://stevescomputingblog.blogspot.com/

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  18. Thanks for the kind words, M.

    Sandi, I'll email you with (hopefully) a solution for your profile picture; it's somewhat long to post here.

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  19. I've noticed this problem of disappearing images for years, I've tried to track it down a couple of times but always hit a brick wall.
    Other people have experienced this problem, but no one (that I've found yet) can explain how it happens or how to stop it.
    I can document the disappearance by listing the folders that used to contain images but are now empty - but that's as far as I got. I thought I was going crazy, but if it's happened to you, then maybe not (or maybe you're crazy too? -- kidding)

    Will whoever is doing this please stop?


    -Deck

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  20. Deck

    I wrote this post in 2009 and thought I had resolved the problem with help from Stephen Cooper (see his comments above), however, I am still getting emails from people who have lost pictures and I trecently noticed more of mine have disappeared from archived posts. Perhaps we are all a bit crazy!

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  21. HI there
    Please can you answer this for me as you seem to know a lot about missing pics: if I change a photo on my laptop from one folder to another will I lose the picture on blogger if it is in a post? Thanks in advance.

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    1. Hello Odette
      I'm not an expert - just very experienced in losing pictures! However, I don't think changing the folder you keep your pictures in should matter. I would try one and if it disappears from your blog you can load it again from the new folder. Good luck.

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