Arrrgh! Blogger's new image controls
[begin off topic rant] Have to vent. I don't know what prompted the change, but Blogger's new image controls are terrible. Makes posting much more of a hassle. Where to start?
First of all this blog will probably always be pretty image heavy, as we love to post a lot of animation pictures and book-related illustrations. So image control is important on the blog.
For some inexplicable reason, the good folks at Google (who now own Blogger) have seen fit to all but ruin the image posting controls from the online Blogger posting application. Now every image uploads by default as a linked image- either to a (badly) generated thumbnail, or even sillier- to a copy of itself! This results in my image server filling up quickly with rediculous duplicate files.
Those of us who want neither thumbnails of our images displayed, our files renamed with long, useless strings of numbers, or duplicate inline copies of the same image files strewn all over our servers, are forced to prune out the added link code and delete extra space-wasting image files via FTP. All in all, it makes posting images a huge hassle, whereas this used to be a lot easier. My wife was reduced to hair pulling frustration the other day with one of her Blogs- she loves to do her own very precise image and text layout- the new controls have made that a nightmare.
Even linking to pre-uploaded images produces the same hassles.
Some controls, such as align functions that one used to have to hand-code are welcome, but no choice when it comes to linked images, files being renamed, duplicate uploads, etc. is wretched.
An adequate solution would be as simple as leaving the links out of the choice 'full size' on image uploads, and just uploading the full, unaltered file as before. But anyway, not really sure why I'm babbling about all this here- just frustrated. [end off topic rant]
posted by Harry McLaughlin @ 7/13/2005 01:34:00 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
I totally agree! If Google wants to buy a company and maintain they're ability to mae information available easily then they should really straigten this mess out! I hate it as is and have been seriously thinking of switching to http://www.xanga.com
-signed
annoyed blogger
I'd consider switching, but I really hate the idea of porting over the entire journal to xanga.
I've been looking at desktop application alternatives to blogger's online controls, but so far each tool I've found has serious flaws, making none of them an effective complete replacement.
Zoundry (www.zoundry.com) is one of the best. It's great for managing several blogs at once, as you can log on and post or correct posts very quickly. It's image controls are even worse than blogger's however- it automatically resizes and links every image willy-nilly, with no choice of size. Also there's no html editing at all. It seems to be a beta though, with perhaps much better features coming in a later release, but for now, I use it just as a stand-in correction tool.
w:bloggar (www.wblogger.com) is another tool, but it's so barebones (no WYSIWYG) that I find it a pain to use.
Right now I'm experimenting with Powerblog (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pwrblog/) but so far I've found it to be seriously flawed. In trying to post, I couldn't get it to upload images via FTP at all, and it's locked up in nearly every use. I chalk it up to being (thus far) underdeveloped open source software.
Hi,
Just came across this post. I am from Zoundry. Just an update on our Sept (build 126+) release of the Blog Writer application. You now have the option of not to linking to larger image; Blogger draft posts; and you can resize an image (via image properties). We hope to add spell check and some intial form of a html source editor and finally get out the beta mode :)
- pidge
found this post after doing a google search. You are so right about how silly it is that blogger makes copies of image files. At first I didn't pay much attetion to it, but lately I've had to buy more server space. Guess what was taking up 90% of my space about 5 gigs worth. Images, and half of them duplicates. You nailed it also with how the blogger renames the images as numbers. There's no easy way of finding out which images could be deleted or not because they are just a string of useless numbers.
How many people blogging are finding out that blogger is going to end up costing them money? Server space doesn't last forever and isn't always free like blogspot. Eventually you'll have to buy more, or get rid of years of photos on your blog.
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