Apparently, Google have updated Blogger with a new way of storing the images we upload. It started when they took the editing tools from the task bar at the top of the post writing and editing page, and hid it behind three dots instead. At this time they changed the photo uploading and display.
For the past 3 years, I have been using a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra smart phone to take my crossdressing photos. It's a powerful piece of kit. The rear camera has an array of lenses and a sensor of up to 200 mega pixels available to use and the front (selfie) camera has 12mp. For comparison, my DSLR camera, the Canon Eos 7D, has an 18mp sensor. So the image file sizes the S23 Ultra can produce are massive.
Up until now, Blogger has happily created decent small versions of the image for the blog, and stored the full size file for viewing if the viewer clicks on the image. It still does store and allow the full size image to be viewed in all of it's glory. But with massive files, it can no longer handle them on the blog posts, and it compresses them until they are pixelated and horrible to view.
I uploaded a post on Sunday morning, and noticed the awful image quality on the post. And then my heart sank, as I realised that every image created on the S23 Ultra, on every post on the blog, was affected. Suddenly my blog, looked awful and ugly to me.
I tried to find a solution to the problem by looking through online posts and Google AI. They confirmed it was a file size issue. Google AI gave me several potential solutions to try. But none of them worked. We concluded that it was an unsolvable issue.
By now I was having a neurodiverse melt down, and I was suffering mentally. I'll write more about that on a future post. It may seem like an overreaction, but to someone with autism, like myself, it's something that happens when things get challenging. My blog is very important to me, as it keeps me in touch with the true me, who only gets to appear in physical form, about 15% of the time. The other 85% of the time is a charade I am forced to maintain for the benefit of others in my life. So having my blog disfigured was triggering.
I looked for alternatives. I follow a few WordPress blogs. They look great. But when I signed up to it, and began creating a blog site, I was pretty quickly out of my depth. It's so much more complicated than Blogger. And I don't find Blogger exactly easy. Another alternative that friends and also Google AI suggested, was Substack. I tried it, and set up a Substack page and imported my blog posts from Blogger. It was ok at first. But then I was bombarded with posts from other users, asking me to follow them. And I found out that anyone ftom outside of Substack, viewing my Substack blog, would be getting constant messages to join or sign up and subscribe and receive emails and updates directly to their inbox, from my blog. And I was also getting messages from Substack about how to monetise my blog. I can see it's a good place for artists, writers and creatives, who want to engage with a community of like minded people or run a creative business. But I don't want to exist within a community like that. I want my blog to be out there for everyone. So I deleted my page and account after 24 hours.
So that left me with a choice. Blogger or nowt. I have really enjoyed blogging and I feel a connection with some of the other bloggers I follow. Also I know that my audience extends beyond the blogging world because quite a few friends follow my blog, without being bloggers themselves. And apparently I'm massive in Vietnam, Singapore and Brazil (waves to the bots👋).
So I decided to try and find a way forward. I took my blog out of public view, and set up a Test Post and experimented with different ways of resizing my photos and then posted them to the blog and viewed them. Some solutions worked OK. Others didn't. But all of them were better than what I had. Eventually I found a good solution. ImageResizer.com. Here I could resize my photos to 1200mp, which apparently is the ideal size for Blogger. It worked. Not as well as the old Blogger image interface worked, but good enough for me.
So then began the task of deleting all of the corrupted images, creating resized versions and posting these back into the old blog posts.
So far I've repaired all of the posts from 2026. At this time, I reopened this blog to the public view. I will slowly work through 2025 until the whole blog is fixed.
Another thing I have done is bought a new phone. My Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra was the problem with it's huge files. Resizing smaller files to 1200mp will result in sharper images on the blog posts. My S23 Ultra was going to need replacing anyway next year, as it was only supported by Samsung for 4 years. My new phone is a Samsung Galaxy S25 Fe. The good news is that this year, Samsung extended the support that they now provide to 7 years starting with the Galaxy S26 models. So that's 2032. But they also committed to supporting last year's model, the S25, to the same date. So I bought one of last year's phones to save a lot of money.
The Samsung Galaxy S25fe has a 50mp rear camera, as opposed to a 200mp camera on the S23 Ultra, so it's still a decent performer, but not as good as the latter camera. But it's fine for what I want to use it for. The S23 Ultra was overkill in that department. It's intended for photography enthusiasts. And I have my trusty DSLR for that. So this new phone and it's camera should be perfect for my femme photographic needs.
So I'm back in the bloggy world again, with my original Blog intact and hopefully able to continue for a few years yet.
Thank you for your patience.
Dee
💋💋💋
No comments:
Post a Comment