Learning Curve Woes

 My husband and I bought new cell phones about two weeks ago. They are Google Pixel phones. Yes, Google actually manufactures cell phones. This is my first smart phone; before, I just had a little flip phone for emergencies. My husband owned a Samsung Galaxy previously. For both of us it is a learning curve.

I was totally surprised when I opened the Pictures app on my new phone to see photos from my blog. I had no idea I had stored them on Google Pictures. I guess when I used Live Writer rather than the Blogger template when I first started blogging, the photos were put in Google Pictures. Live Writer was discontinued by Microsoft so I was forced to switch to using the Blogger composer. Those are not stored in the cloud.

My husband also found himself staring on his phone at all of these blog photos as well as the few practice photos I took on my new phone. I could see his photos as well. Turns out it is best to use the File app where the images taken by the phone are stored. That way a person isn't looking at all of the photos stored on Google. 

I noticed the photos stored in the Pictures app from my blog had duplicates. I tried cleaning some of them up by removing one of the duplicates to save space. Today my husband told me was deleting my blog photos on his phone. Except of course he wasn't removing them from his phone but from Google Pictures online.

When I went to the early posts of my blog, I found a gray square with a null circle in the middle for most photos. For some reason, a few still retained photos. I had seen this before on the blog of a woman that I read regularly. She had stored her photos on Google. One day she found all of her photos on her blog had turned into these meaningless squares. She was so despondent she was going to quit blogging, but many of her followers convinced her to ignore the past blogs and move on with new posts. 

Tonight I went exploring. Unlike this other blogger left with no pictures, most of my photos are stored on my computer, not just on Google. In fact, that was the only place I thought they appeared. Since between my husband and I we have messed up several hundred photos, it will be a big job to restore them to the affected posts. However, I see there is an album marked Blog on Google Pictures that still seems to retain the photos. Apparently what was "destroyed" was some kind of links on the post from the photos to Google Pictures. And this album mostly has the photos in the order they appeared on my blog. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way to "select" all of them at once and download or copy in one fell swoop. I am copying them one-by-one into a Fix-it folder on my computer. Once I have them copied, I will restore a few at a time on the blog posts.

So if for some reason you are looking at my posts before February 2017, you will probably currently see the ugly null square instead of a photo. I apologize. I am working on fixing the problem. I have fixed two posts and it appears deleting and replacing the ugly null square with the saved copies does work.