Slow Slog

 I have been working on restoring the pictures to my blog posts that were affected when my husband and I removed photos from Google Picture from our cell phones without realizing that the blog would lose them.

I have about a 4 1/2 year period that needs to be fixed. Of course not every post had photos, but some like the one about Winona Lake had 2 dozen. 

I have reached January of 2014 so still have about 3 years to fix yet. It is a slow slog. I discovered that if I went to "view" rather than to "edit" that sometimes the photos would appear if I clicked on the gray box; then I could save them to my computer to be inserted into the posts. Mostly I have been using the photos in a folder in Google labeled Blog Pictures. Using that makes the photos appear in the order they appear on my blog which is better than searching through all of the photos already saved on my computer.

 In some cases the photos are gone. They do not appear when I click on the gray boxes, they are not in the Google Blog folder, and they are not on my computer. I have to edit the text sometimes since what is being described has no corresponding photo.

What I don't understand is not all of the posts that have/had photos were affected by our blunder. I am wondering if once things are fixed and I remove the Google photos off of our phones, will these that were not restored because they hadn't disappeared suddenly disappear. I will have to test that hypothesis carefully. 

Once I reach 2016, the Live Writer mechanism I used to create posts was discontinued and I had to use Blogger direct, and those photos were not stored on Google. As I mentioned before I did not know that the Live Writer photos had been stored on Google Picture at all or that there was a link to where they were stored to the blog post. 

It has been interesting to see what I talked about 9 years ago. Hard to believe I have been blogging that long. Some of the memories relived while restoring have been hard reminders of challenging times such as when I tore a tendon in my foot that required surgery and staying off my foot for 6 weeks, slowly regaining use of it. Most are just the stuff of routine life with a trip thrown in sometimes. Next week is very busy so I doubt I will get much fixing done. It is going to take time and persistence.

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.