Tip: Transferring your Blogger blog and its images

Lets face it - sometimes life comes to a point where you need to hand over the reigns of your blog to someone else. You've built a great site, with lots of great content and followers and you don't want to see it die, so you want to bring a new "owner" in to the site and transfer the entire site to them. The process is easy, but unfortunately most people only do 1/2 of the job; they forget to transfer the photos!

The Situation

You created your Blogger site using a Gmail address, so your Blogger website is tied to that Gmail account. Each and every time that you publish a blog post with images, those images are being stored in a Picasa album that is also tied to that Gmail address. And if you've invited other authors and administrators to your blog, each of them also will have a Picasa album tied to their individual Gmail accounts for the images they've published through your Blog.

If they delete images in those Picasa albums that are being used in your blog they will then show up as big black "missing images" in your blog posts.

And if you are no longer affiliated with the blog, you'd likely want to get rid of the images in your Picasa account that are taking up space (counting against your free space or costing you hosting monies).

The Fix

You might have noticed in the notes at the end of the ownership transfer step it says "Photos uploaded with Account 1 will break if that account is deleted. If you want your old photos to display after adding Account 2, you'll have to leave Account 1 active." Those instructions are missing the part where they show you how to transfer those images to the new blog administrator so that the old administrator or contributor isn't left storing images for a site they're no longer affiliated with.

Once you've followed the ownership transfer process for your Blogger site, follow this next set of instructions for transferring the images associated with that blog to the new administrator.

We also recommend this being done whenever you have a blog contributor who will no longer be contributing to your blog so that they don't "accidentally" delete the album from their Picasa account and cause images breaks in your blog.

Comments

  1. I think that Blogger's instructions are missing the info about transferring the Picasa albums because that function didn't actually exist until recently.

    Your post has got me thinking, though: maybe when we're giving someone else author or admin rights, we should also give them shared access to a Picasa-web folder, and ask them to load all pictures to it manually, rather than to put them in via the upload in the post editor. It would be a bit more work, but well worth it if they ever leave again.

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    Replies
    1. Hi Mary,

      Yes, it confused me to, because I didn't know this was possibly until recently, and it looks like it was only added within the last year or even sooner.

      I 100% agree about the shared album, the only problem is one small catch: an album is limited to 1,000 images, and only 1 album can be attached to your Blogger site per user.

      Which brings up a problem when you 1) post lots of images to your blog but are still under your storage quota and 2) further compound it by having multiple authors contributing to that album.

      If only we can resolve this attachment issue! I made a suggestion of transferring your attached album to a 2nd gmail account, renaming it in the transferred user's picasa, uploading an image through your Blogger site which will create a new album in the original user's picasa, then transferring the account back to the original user. This would seem to detach the account, get you past the 1,000 image limit, and keep it under your control.

      -David

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