Friday, July 22, 2011

Google+ hosed my blog


Recently I accepted an invite to Google plus. I really didn't want to or think much of it, but it took literally two mouse clicks so I figured what the heck, why not.

The interesting thing is that when you sign up for this site, it imports all of your previous Picasa albums as well as all blogspot images. So I looked at my new "Google+" profile page and noticed there was an album called "blogspot images". My blog images are pictures of calendars, windsurfing photos and random irreverent photos that generally demonstrate a crude idea. Not really the type of thing I want people in my "google circle" to go thumbing through. I went ahead and deleted that Picasa album and forgot all about it.

A couple days later I noticed that all the images were gone from my blog, but figured it was due to some broken server somewhere in the dungeons of Google. That's not the case, apparently when I deleted that album on Google+ it permanently deleted all the images that I've been using on blogspot.

So there you have it. The hundreds of photos I've shared over the last 4 years as a blogger by uploading directly to blogspot are gone forever.

Not really sure what I'm going to do with the blog moving forward. Going back and uploading all the images I previously uploaded would take literally days (given the weak upload speeds I'm dealing with, not to mention vague and often misleading captions). Also, I don't feel like contributing content to the google empire is necessarily the right thing to do anymore. I guess I'll just sleep on it.

7 comments:

Luke said...

That sucks man! Sounds like a Google - experience. Write them a letter and see if they can resurrect the files.

windsurfinggypsy said...

ha ha ha I was wondering what happened! I have not done the google+ thing but was sent an invite....but even before that all the images on my blog are on a picasa web album as well. Going ahead I think that you can set privacy controls on that end that would stop people from searching the picasa web albums.

Donna said...

By default, your blog albums are not visible to your Google+ circles so nobody would have seen those albums except you and the folks on your blog (because your blog know the link to the file on Picasa).

I moved my blog to typepad several years ago and lost three years worth of photos. Just going back a couple of months and replacing the photos made me feel much better about the blog. Most of my readers never even noticed the missing photos in the older posts.

Catapulting Aaron said...

Donna -- Good to know! Would have been great to know a week ago!

Maybe I should spend some time uploading the pics again.

MikeyZ said...

Aaron, if I can help you out in someway I'd be happy to. Personally, I treasure the early content on this blog since it brought me here. AND since it is such a good reference for windsurfing launches and conditions in the bay area.

CdnGuy said...

What a major drag. I'm planning on making a book out of my blog some day; I'm going to look into getting a backup made. I was looking at your old blog posts not too long ago, it would be sad if the pictures are gone forever.

The Best of the World said...

Sadly it happened to me as well: http://thebestofvienna.blogspot.com/2012/04/update-regarding-black-boxes-on-best-of.html