What a waste of a week, blog-wise!
I made the enormous mistake of upgrading to the new Blogger (I’ve been putting it off each time the offer pops up), and have found the results paralyzingly difficult.
I’ve had gmail for almost three years, and have always been wowed by their customer service, attention to detail, and proactive attitudes. I’ve written in with suggestions or annoyances and seen the software change within days. The Blogger/Hello software has never been as exciting, but I’ve never had an issue with it either and it was free! So rock on. However, now that I have two and a half years of my life recorded here, change makes me leery, especially when poorly executed.
First of all, Hello (the program I’ve used to post photos) has been retired. It served its purpose, but I’m not sorry to see it go. Unfortunately, the next-gen Picasa 2 is best-case buggy, and more frequently fails to work at all. Such a time-suck. I applied my software testing skills to developing consistent repros and logged about 5 bugs, only to get an “interesting, but whatever” response back from google for each of them. Quite frustrating. Second, the new blogger dashboard does not let me log in consistently. The fix they emailed me was to stop using Internet Explorer (clearly not a good option, especially given how much I like IE7) — frankly, not helpful. I’m very disappointed.
For recent & unhappy blogger/hello converts who are in the same boat and can’t post pictures anymore, I’m recommending Flickr. It’s not the best site, usability-wise, but once you get it set up, it works like a charm and the tech support is great.
You can create a flickr account here, then once you’re logged in, go here for instructions on how to add flickr to your blogger account (follow the “head over to Google now” link). Once you are all set up, download the Flickr Uploadr client (despite the dumb name, it’s much better than uploading one picture at a time through the website). Once you have pictures uploaded, click on the picture you want to upload, and then click the “blog this” button above the photo.
Equivalent to Hello, without the new harddrive-rearranging tendencies of Picasa2.