Experimenting with Blogger

We've seen several times how Blogger munges uploaded photos; most recently in yesterday's post.

Here's an exploration of the problem.

Let's start with a full-resolution photo; a 3072x2304 foliage photo I took on a hike to a local mountaintop. (Lots of Fall foliage, but about a week past peak color with the brilliant reds now shading to warm ambers and browns.) The photo was taken with a 7.1 mpx camera. I'll link you to the photo; check it out and then click back to here for the next one.

Full-res photo, externally hosted on Pbase.com:
http://upload.pbase.com/flanga/image/105123134/original.jpg

Note: your browser may scale the photo so you can see it all. Use the "enlarge" "see original" function to see the photo at full size.

Now, here's the EXACT SAME photo uploaded directly from my hard drive via the Blogger "add photo" interface:


Click on that 400x300 auto-thumbnail, and you'll see a larger version (1600x1200), but it's still way smaller than the original. Note that Blogger has also slightly altered the "aspect ratio" (the height-to-width proportion) of the photo. That's not ideal, but it's workable.

Blogger's "add photo" function also lets you add embed a photo from an external host, instead of uploading it directly from your hard drive.

I uploaded the same full-res photo to Photobucket, which is a sister service of Blogger. (They're both owned by Google.)

Using the Blogger "add photo" interface, here's what you get:




I'm guessing that when this post goes live, you'll see a truncated sliver of the left side of the photo. I can't really tell what you'll see because the above looks fine in Blogger's "preview" mode; the full image is shown. Past experience tells me not to trust the "preview" and that the image will be truncated when it goes live. A preview function that doesn't really let you see what the final post will look like is next to useless.

And remember, the SAME EXACT action--- uploading photos via the Blogger's "add photo" interface--- produced those very different results. That's bad interface design. The same action should not produce wildly different results.

Now: Let's see what Blogger does with a modestly-sized 1024x768 externally hosted version of the same photo:



How about an 800x600 version:



So, now we have an idea of Blogger's photo limitations.

Blogger's free, so it's silly to get worked up about its shortcomings. But it's good to know what those limitations are, so you can work around them.

Now that I understand how it's handling (and failing to handle) my photos, I can avoid the problems we've seen in several earlier posts. And if you use Blogger, maybe you can too!