Earlier today, Steve at "Shadows and Light" posted a snowy photo of Liverpool Street Station in London. That snow keeps falling down - endlessly. Though Steve had snapped the original picture a few years back, it had been lifted and animated by Google. Steve played no part in the enhancement nor the selection.
The same happened with some of my pictures. I snapped the photographs five years ago and soon afterwards Google got a hold of them and kind of processed them into a short but fast-moving slide show. The images go by pretty quickly and I have no means of slowing them down nor restoring their original colour and sharpness.
The pictures flash by. The black and white one shows a snowy scene in our garden in the winter of 2016. And there are those swans we saw in the boating lake behind Colchester Castle in Essex. The herd of cows are resting in the shadow of Hardwick Hall in the summer 0f 2015. This was the original image:-
Google don't seem to provide this unrequested service any more. Maybe it was just an experiment.
I still bewail the loss of Panoramio which was hosted by Google. They pulled the plug on it in 2016. I had contributed to this worldwide photo site for almost ten years, carefully geo-locating multiple images I had collected during my travels around the world.
There was nothing that I nor the thousands of other Panoramio contributors could do to prevent the site's disappearance. Could the same happen to Blogger in the future? I hope not but it is possible. After all, nothing lasts forever and if Google ever determine that their blog hosting service has run its course or become too costly or technically too problematic then Blogger could go in heartbeat, taking with it everybody's blogposts. They have become precious evidence of the lives we bloggers have been living through recent years but in the end there would be no vote, no debate. They would just go without even a puff of smoke.
As I have discovered a couple of times, sites can just close down. I am a bit fortunate in that my blog is archived by our state library and I think there is a way to back up your blog, hopefully meaning that even if Blogger closes down, you will have a copy of your blog.
ReplyDeleteSo your unwanted slideshow is made up of your photos and the originals are no longer stored?
I still have all those pictures stored on my computers. When Panoramio disappeared I do not believe that there was any way of backing up one's section of the website. The pictures just went - millions of them.
DeleteThat is the problem, maybe we should have been putting each post on a memory stick.
ReplyDeleteBriony
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It's not too late to do that. External hard drives hold far more material than memory sticks.
DeleteIt's likely that blogger will eventually become disused and unfashionable enough to be discontinued, which would be disappointing. The solution is to buy your own domain name and transfer your blog to the new domain.
ReplyDeleteI know what to do but will I do it?
I don't think that I am capable of doing that Kylie. I might just but selected blogposts on to an external hard drive.
DeleteI would absolutely hate that to happen. I love writing and reading blogs and going back years to see what was happening or how I was feeling. But you're right--if the powers that be decide to shut down the site, we lose everything.
ReplyDeleteLet us hope that when or if that day comes, they give us plenty of warning.
DeleteIt would certainly surprise me to see some of my photos go flashing by in a slide show. . I hope blogger doesn't disappear.
ReplyDeleteMe too. It has given me a lot of pleasure - as well as bumping into you Red!
DeleteSomething to look forward to, obsolescence.
ReplyDeleteObsolescence is a good word. It has a certain finality about it!
DeleteI don't doubt that this blogging platform will be shut down one day. Some fellow bloggers are having (part of) their posts printed and bound as books, others use different backup methods. So far, I have not done anything at all. Most of what I write seems far too trivial to keep for posteriy, and those photos that matter most to me (the majority of which never appear on my blog) are stored elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteAhead of possible closure, I should at least be saving selected blogposts on to an external hard drive.
DeleteI have only been blogging for a short while and my posts are nothing special so no great loss, however, all those blogs that I follow that have a rich collection of interesting and well researched content would be a sad loss indeed.
ReplyDeleteYou are just reaching the end of your fourth year of blogging JayCee and it has covered an interesting phase of your life. It would be sad to see it all evaporate.
DeleteI have one of those slideshows too! I think Google did stuff like that when they were trying to attract people to their social media site. They created these pictures to get us to post them there. Now that social media site is dead but the pictures live on!
ReplyDeleteI would hope that Google wouldn't simply pull the plug on Blogger without giving us some options, but who knows. I periodically download an XML back-up of my blog which I THINK would allow me to upload the content to another blogging platform if need be. I haven't tested that, though, so I don't know how well it would work!
As I have said to others, if THE END ever did appear on the horizon I would probably save a big sample of my blogposts on an external hard drive. But would it just be like putting stuff up in the attic?
DeleteI was just looking forward to reading what you had written about the two swans when whoosh, I was looking at a photo of sheep, then whoosh - another photo came into view! Now I've read your explanation, it seems a bit unnerving to me that Google can take over in such a way. Rather unsettling to be controlled by something you can't see, speak to, or clout round the ear if they are annoying! I'm not usually given to thoughts of violence, but I can understand how upsetting it must be for bloggers to lose all carefully thought out input and photos.
ReplyDeleteBy the way - what's happened to Haggerty - haven't seen any of his comments for a while.
Mr Haggerty has a habit of disappearing for a while and then coming back. He has a hell of a lot of reading and viewing to do in these quiet periods you know.
DeleteSome of us have no problem with the speed of the slide show, like Superman reading whole books by riffling through the pages.
ReplyDeleteI forgot that when you put on your cape and mask you are Super Dunham!
DeleteI think the slideshow of your photos amazing. I wish I had that feature on my blog.
ReplyDeleteI bet if you start googling around you could discover how to make your own slideshow Dave.
DeleteAlthough I use blogger for my platform, I also pay for my own domain at GoDaddy. It's very inexpensive. I don't know if that would help if blogger disappeared or not.
ReplyDeleteIf Blogger ever does go, I expect they will give us all a helpful forewarning.
DeleteI think he answer is that it would disappear if Blogger went. I've got my own custom domain name on NameCheap (true to myself) but the content is still on Blogger. All that happens is that the custom domain redirects to Blogger. This raises another issue. I suspect that if we failed to renew our custom domain names then our content would become inaccessible despite still being there.
DeleteWhy does Life have to be so hard here in the western world?
DeleteI just checked and have two snow pictures created by Google as well. I have learned that any time someone posts a photo, it is as good as gone. One particular photo of my 5th great grandma was taken by someone and posted onto their site with a different name and then it got copied so many times to other sites that my posting with the real name is now an anomaly and discounted as being true, though I still have a scanned copy of the back of the picture with the actual name that I never put online. So I have learned to crop, reduce in size or otherwise alter any photograph that I don't want used elsewhere so that I can prove that I own the original.
ReplyDeleteMany of my photos have been lifted from the Geograph site and used by others. As long as they follow the copyright recognition guidelines this is okay.
DeleteThe last time G did that with my photos was January 2020. Had flash photo series and also a brief movie using some of my video clips. Had enhanced a couple of other photos in the same email. Someone must have had extra time on their hands that day.
ReplyDeleteThe whole enterprise is rather odd - with no photographer input.
DeletePerhaps if Blogger ever decides to shut down, they'll let everyone know so they can transfer their blog content somewhere else. That's what I did when I moved from Blogger to Wordpress. I originally blogged at Yahoo360 and didn't have the internet capabilities to do that when they shut down. Instead, I printed out 2.5 years of blog posts (including photos)! Talk about a project!
ReplyDeleteI don't know how regularly you posted Kelly but that sounds like one hell of a job!
DeleteI guess we would have to transfer our blogs elsewhere. I keep a record of my posts and every few years have them printed up as 'home books' so I have a physical record. There is good PDF service from Blog2Print which will format your entire blog for about £10.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the heads up Mark. I will have a look at that.
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