Sunday, January 21, 2007

Photos, now that BloggerBot is gone?

I am really trying to come up with a good way to post photos on my blog. Up to now, I've been using Hello to upload a bunch of pictures to a specific photo blog, "Annes Food Pics". Then, when I want to blog about a photo, I've linked to the larger size of the photo, and having the small size shown on my actual blog. This has worked so well - but now Hello is no more (or at least BloggerBot is dead) so I need to come up with a new way to do it.

So far, I've tried:

1. Uploading photos directly in blogger. Not great, because it gives different addresses for the large and the small size of the photo. (With Hello, it was just a matter of changing "640" to "320" for the sizes.)

2. Using Picasa to upload. Same problem as above, plus it also adds an annoying Picasa logo, and besides, I don't like using Picasa at all.

3. Using Flickr to post to my blog. Bigger problem - not only is it not stored on Blogger anymore (which I rather liked), it's also the wrong size since Flickr sizes are different from Blogger sizes.

So. What's a girl to do? Right now, I'm thinking that either I'll just use Flickr, and not minding so much that the photos are smaller than I like. However, I mainly use my Flickr accout for my cat pictures, so having the food there too - well, I could, I suppose. Another option is simply linking to the small size of Blogger pictures, but then visitors wouldn't have the option of clicking on them to get them larger. Then again, maybe not very many do that.

I'd really, really love some input here! What do you do? What should I do? :)

This Post was written by Anne from Anne's Food.

10 comments:

Pille said...

Anne - I've been using Blogger to upload pictures from the beginning. You can specify whether you want it to appear small/medium/large on your screen - but when you (or your readers) click on the published image, then they have the option to see it as large as your original picture (mine are usually 800x600 pix)

Anne said...

Pille, the problem is that in order to have the pictures click-able, I'd have to upload them to my actual blog. I much rather have them in a separate blog, and then link to them. It can still be done, but it's pretty tedious since the addresses are different - not a huge deal, but it also takes so long to upload pictures directly in Blogger. It might still be the easiest solution, I suppose.

Ziz said...

personally, I think having the option for them to click and be taken to the larger picture (probably taken to its flickr page) is the way to go. I know that if I visit a site and the images are small, I'm usually dying to see them larger. :) Just my two cents..

Sam said...

i am facing the same problem as you anne. it's annoying that all the alternatives are now much slower and that the file name paths are different for large and small.

there is another problem that if you tweak an image in picasa - ie crop it or recolour it or something you HAVE to use the blogger button in picasa because the changes you make are only saved in picasa, they are not changed in the file itself, hence if you loaded from inside the blogger post you woud real in the original file without the changes.

i think i am going to continue as you are suggesting even though it is slower.

Ed Tep said...

Anne - When I post a pic using Flikr, I cut and paste the html code into blogger (it doesn't matter which size you select). Then I edit the html code and manually change the width and height. Usually I type in 400 for the width and 300 for the height is 300. But, the images still get stored in Flickr as opposed to Blogger.

Anne said...

Thanks everyone! Ed - coool, I will try that immediately. That could be a very reasonable solution. Not a separate picture blog anymore, but I could easily organize the pictures in Flickr. Worth trying, anyway. Thanks!

Sam said...

you could do what Ed is suggesting and resize in the code with photos from anywhere - those loaded on blogger would work this way as those on Flickr, if you know the code, but it is not necessarily recommended.

for example if you have a large picture and you resize it smaller, your users still have to load in the large image even though they are only seeing the small one.

i do it sometimes when i am lazy but i am not proud of myself

You also have to do the x/y resolution math which is ok if your pictures are always the same aspect ratio, but not so easy if you are always using different aspect ratios.

Anne said...

Sam, I hear you on that. It seems that Flickr's medium size is close enough that it's not a huge scaling to be done, thus not taking unnecessary long to load. I just tried it with one photo and well, I think I'll try it some more. (But secretly wishing for BloggerBot to return, sigh..)

As far as height/width ratio, that could be problematic, but my husband happily informed me that it's enough to just specify the width of the picture (which I really want to be the same - I don't care what height it is since that won't screw up my columns) and most modern webreaders will scale it correctly. Again, trying that out, and so far, it works. (I just put width=320, and nothing at all for height.)

chrispy said...

Sam, if you use the export function in Picassa it saves your edits into a new file so that you can upload from a file instead of using Picassa's Blog this function.

Sam said...

thanks for that tip, i didn't know that - but all i do know is that these extra steps all take time. I thought new technolgy was supposed to save not time, not waste more of it.

*sigh*