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This article explains what has happened to Picasa-web-albums, why it is now re-directing to Google Album Archive, and what you can do about it. Back in July 2013, I described how many people who started  Picasa-web-albums  were being immediately re-directed to Google+ photos and what they could to to return to using PWA again without being re-directed . Quite a few things have changed since then   In particular, Google have: Changed their strategy around Google+ Released Google Photos and retired Google+ Photos Changed the Picasa-web-albums re-direct to go to Google Photos instead of Google+ Photos Stopped supporting Picasa ( announcement ) Stopped supporting Picasa-web-albums ( announcement ) Released a new tool called Google Album Archive , which gives you access to photos, photo-albums and data about photos that you created in Blogger (and other Google tools) - which isn't available in Google Photos . Changed the re-direct on Picasa-web-al...

This article is about how to find the URL (web-address) of a picture that is stored in Picasa web albums.  It is written for Blogger users, but the same technique can be used by anyone who uses Picasa-web-albums. Google+ Photos, Picasa-web-albums and your PC An introduction to Picasa . describes the relationship between Picasa and Picasa-web-albums.  A key difference between is that : Picasa is a program, written by Google, which runs on your PC even when it's not connected to the internet, and  Picasa-web-albums is a Google program that you use through your web-browser  and some accompanying space on the internet where your pictures can be stored. Google+ Photos is another Google program that you use through a web-browser (Chrome, FireFox, Internnet Explorer, Safari, etc), and a space on the space on the internet where you can keep pictures.    Both Picasa-web-albums and Google+ Photos use the same space on the internet to store photos fo...

This article gives a brief introduction to Google Photos, and how it relates to both Blogger and Google+ Photos. Google's recent announcement  of Google Photos opens the door for Blogger to make some improvements to how it works with pictures. Why? Well Google+Photos simply wasn't a way forward.   Too many Blogger users chose not to "upgrade" their Google accounts to Google+ accounts, so it wasn't possible for Blogger to force Google+ features on everyone. And that was even after they removed the rule about one G+ account per person, and allowed Google+ Pages to be turned into stand alone accounts with their own passwords. However Google Photos is basically Google+ Photos, without the need to have a "plus" account, and with some other nice features, like Free picture and video storage (any number of pictures, provided they aren't "too big"),  Image recognition and search Sorting pictures by date, but giving optio...

This article shows how to change the date associated with a picture in Google Photos. Update- August 2015 There is now a feature to change the date of individual pictures or videos in Google Photos. To use it: Navigate to the picture / video you want to set a new date for Click the "information" icon (small "i" currently near the top-right of the photo viewer screen) In the right hand panel, hover your mouse over the item in Details which has a picture of a calendar beside it. Click on the pen icon which appears while you are hovering Enter the new year, month, date and/or time (in 24-hour clock) for your photo or video. Click Save. Job Done!   You have now changed the date stored with your image or video. There are still some photos that you cannot see through Google Photos (eg ones uploaded directly through Blogger with some settings, or shared in Google Hangouts).   For these you need to use the date-editing features in Picasa-web-al...

This article explains the issues, and options, for putting a file into the "root directory" of your Blogger blog. If you are using certain non-Google products to enhance your Blog, they will sometimes tell you to put a file into your root-directory .   They may even tell you to use an FTP  tool to do this. Sometimes this happens when a product also gives you code to install into your blog  , This approach is used when the code is written for websites in general rather than specifically to work with Blogger: putting useful files into a place relative to the root directory makes it a lot easier to move a website from a test-address to the live one, so is a common approach outside of Blogger. Or maybe the other tool has been designed to verify that you do own the website in this way, rather than asking you to change the website code itself. How to add a file to your blog's root directory The short answer for Blogger users is "sorry, you cannot d...

This article explains the relationship between your blog and "the cloud", and other ways that you might be using the cloud without even realising it. A few days ago, I received an email from Sam who works for "SingleHop, a company that specializes in cloud computing." He explained that "Due to recent events like Heartbleed, the Target breach and the leaking of celebrity photos to the public, the world is abuzz about "the cloud." However, you may be wondering what exactly it is and what it does. We are hoping you would be interested in sharing a post with your readers about cloud computing in everyday life. In a nutshell, the cloud is a way to store data remotely, rather than on your home computer. This gives you easy access to your photos, documents, and other files from anywhere at any time. We are hoping that by spreading awareness about how the cloud works, we can help others make smarter decisions about what they post/share online. ...

This article describes how to get the URL or internet address of a picture in Google Photos, and the difference between Google's shareable links and URLs. Google Photos is a tool that help bloggers (and everyone else) to manage their picture collections. It replaces Google+ Photos, and works alongside Picasa-web-albums.   You can read more about it here . In Google Photos, there are two different types of web-address for a photo. One is the URL , and this can be used to refer to pictures from Blogger, or from other tools that want a link that just shows the photo, eg Twitter, Google Maps.  This is the traditional style of internet-address for a photo. The other is the shareable link.   This is what Google Photos provides from the Share function.   Shareable links can be used in Facebook, and other places where the photo that is being shared is displayed within a web-display, rather than just as a picture.   (Ref:   How to make and ...

This article is about Google accounts:  what they are- and aren't, how to access them, and what the account-names look like.   Blogger, Google and Google+ accounts Once upon a time (pre 2006), there was a website on the internet called Blogger.   People created an account on Blogger, and then used it to make a blog - which was owned by their Blogger account. Then Google (the company that made the search engine) purchased Blogger.   They wanted to integrate their products, so Blogger users had to change their original Blogger accounts to "Google accounts", which still had a Blogger profile.  Google were pretty nice about this:   they kept support old, unconverted Blogger accounts up til 2011, but eventually said that no more conversions were possible. At the time, very few people understood the difference between Google-the-company and Google-the-search-engine , so most didn't have any idea of the power and importance of thes...

This article is about how to copy all the posts from one blog to another, using Blogger.  There is a separate article about copying individual posts, or pages, from one blog to another . To copy all the Posts from one blog to another, you need to export them from the first blog, and import the file that was created into the second file. Any Pages (see The Difference between Posts and Pages ) in the first blog, need to be moved individually , because pages aren't currently included in the export file. If you want to totally  replace the contents of the destination blog with the contents of the source blog, then you should delete the existing posts from the destination blog before you import the file.  (NB   Delete posts by going to the Posting / Edit Posts screen, and pressing the Delete button that is beside the post.   Don't delete the entire blog , or you will lose access to the URL). Follow these steps to copy all posts from one blog to a...

This article shows you how to set up another person (ie another Google account) as an author for your blog. Google, Blog-Authors and Blogger Setting someone up as an "author" in Blogger is one way that you can let other people post to your blog. It's easy to do: you tell blogger to create an invitation, which sends the person an email saying you would like to be an author, they click a link in the email and then sign in with a Google account to accept the invitation. And once it is done, the person can write and edit their own posts. All you need to know is the person's email address: it doesn't matter if it's a gmail address or not.  You can send invitations to people with hotmail, yahoo, and indeed any email address where your invitee can read their email.  However the other person will need to use a Google account  (which doesn't necessarily include Gmail) to accept the invitation: don't waste time inviting people who are allergi...

This article shows how to use Google's Takeout service to make a copy of the contents of all your blogs at the same time. A backup is a copy that you can use to restore from if something goes wrong.  For your personal compter, you may have a backup copy of the files on your hard-drive, so that if you lose the machine, you can get the files back, usually with a little work. In blogging terms, a backup of your blog is a copy that you can use if you accidentally delete a post, or lose control of your blog, or perhaps even a copy of a blog that you have deleted but still want some last-chance access to. Unfortunately Blogger does not offer a complete solution for backing up our blogs .    Instead, we need to take separate actions to back up our gadget settings , our template when it is being edited , and our post-contents. You can back up the posts from one content from the Settings > Other > Blog Tools  tab.  If you choose the Export Blog ...