Techie: How NOT to lose all your Blogger Pics!

First, this is a salutary tale of how to avoid losing all your pics from your blog(s) when moving to Google +.  

Second, it highlights how to 

• keep your images private in Picasa
• avoid people downloading your images from Picasa web albums and making prints of your artwork. 

Finally, where to go to get the Picasa software so you can edit your pics.

Some of my UNLISTED Picasa web albms for three different blogs

How to lose all the images on your Blogger Blog

Bill Guffey has been kind enough to let me retell the tale of what happened to him when he joined Google+ - see below.  He's also done a blog post about it on his blog - see Google+, Blogspot and a WARNING!

I didn't know the pics uploaded to Blogspot were stored in Picasa. Didn't even know I had a Picasa account. So when I signed up with Google+ (which looks like it's going to be a good marketing tool) I saw all these pics in my public albums, which I hadn't created. I assume now that they were made by Picasa when uploading pics to my blogs.

There were a few albums with hundreds of pics and well over a thousand in another. I looked at them and they were a mixed lot of Virtual Paintout pics, my personal art pics, and even pics from old now defunct blogs from years ago.

I didn't want all those pics in the albums of my new Google+ account so I deleted them, not knowing they were the source pics for my blogs. ugh... Immediately, all my pics on the blogs were gone. Without a chance of recovery. I do have most pics on a couple of different computers and an external hard drive, but oh what a pain it's going to be to re-upload everything and get them in their correct spots.

You live and learn, and from what I understand this has happened to many people. Google hasn't issued a warning loud enough at this point. I've tried, by posting about this experience on my blog, FB pages and Google+.

Feel free to share this info with others so that it might save someone major headaches.

OK - so after the sharp intake of breath at what it must feel like to LOSE all your images from your blog - what do you need to know?

Here's what you need to know - Picasa Basics

First back up your images BEFORE you do anything with Picasa! 

Next this is what you need to know about Picasa.  I hasten to add that I'm upgrading my knowledge on the hoof - and what follows represents as far as I've got.  Please feel free to chip in with a comment about anything you've learned which is relevant for art bloggers. 

Red words are "proper names" in Googe. 

1. All the images you upload from your computer to Blogger are stored in Picasa web albums - which are automatically created.  You may never have seen your Picasa web albums but you can be sure they exist. 
2. Here's how to locate your Picasa web albums
1. Log into Bloggger - which effectively means you've logged into your Google account
2. Now create a new tab (in your browser) and use https://picasaweb.google.com/home as the URL for that tab.  This should bring up all your web albums
3. By default it shows you all your most recent albums
4. You may need to click the "show all albums" to see the ones that have been created over time
3. A new album is automatically created for:
1. each new blog (on a group blog it will only contain the images you've uploaded)
2. when the album has got 500 pics in it
4. In addition, all photos uploaded to Google Maps also have their own album - called Photos for Google Maps
5. When you sign up for Google+, you'll see all of your Picasa Web albums on your Google+ photos homepage.  THERE IS NO EXPLANATION THAT THESE ARE YOUR BLOGGER IMAGES. This is where Bill got confused and accidentally deleted them.  Moral of the story - don't do anything at this stage but look!
6. Joining Google+ means yet more new and automatic albums are created.  These are (I think - on the basis that I've never seen them before):
1. Profile Photos - for photos you upload to your Google Profile (required for Google +)
2. Scrapbook Photos - which I assume will be for photos uploaded to the Google + Stream (rather like photos in Facebook - uploaded to the streaming page)
7. If you want to share albums:
• this is how sharing Picasa Albums works
• anyone an album is shared with can see who else it is shared with - which basically means everyone can see who else is in your circles.
• Albums that you've shared can, in turn, be tagged and shared by others.
8. Google+ provides free storage for your photos, which are automatically resized to 2048 pixels on the longest edge, maintaining the proportions of the image. 
9. IMPORTANT Album privacy: You have the ability to set the visibility for your albums.  
• You cannot differentiate between photos within albums for privacy purposes - it would appear.  At least I haven't found any way of doing so as yet.  Unlike Flickr there is no fine tuning available which enables differentiation as to different levels of privacy.  Which means ALL images in an album are either public or private. I keep all of mine unlisted.  Why?  Well, on the basis that I'm displaying other people's artwork on my blog which so far as I am concerned means it should always be shown with proper accreditation and links where feasible - and that's in the text of the blog post.
• you can check which albums are public and which are unlisted by clicking the links on the top right handside of the Picasa screen ie View My: Public Gallery|Unlisted Gallery  (Note: The only gallery which I have set to public is my profile album)
• If you share them then the people they're shared with can now reshare them with others. Learn more
• To encourage the natural flow of conversation, once you sign up for Google+, all albums can be reshared by people that have access to the album -- those people on the album's 'Shared with' list in Picasa Web Albums.
10. IMPORTANT Prevent Prints and Download of your Photos.  There's a discussion on Google + which highlights the following.  Make sure you set your privacy settings within Google Photos (ie. Picasa) to keep people from ordering prints of your images or downloading you images.
    
    • 1. Click on Photos at the very top in the black nav bar.
    • 2. Little Gear in the far right very top corner is your settings link for whichever aspect of G+ you are in.
    • 3. Go to Photo Settings > Go to Privacy and Permissions
    • 4. Make sure there is no tick in the box for
      Allow any visitor to:
      Order prints
      Download my photos
    • 5. Save Changes.

Incidentally, one of the neat things about Picasa albums is you can check how many times one particular image has been viewed over time.

Take a look round and see if you can work out where this information is.  (I'll post an update if nobody finds the information - otherwise look in comments for the answer!)

How to manipulate your photos in Picasa

One of the things which is confusing is that Google uses the same word - Picasa - for both the photo storage function and the editing of photos webware which it also supplies.

You can download software to do some basic manipulation of your photos using Picasa webware.  There's a different version for Mac users.

So remember Picasa Web Albums is where the photos are stored!

Learn more about Picasa and Picasa Web Albums
Watch a video introduction
Use iPhoto? Download the free Picasa Web Albums uploader