21 August 2012

Live Writer vs. Blogger; Picture Uploads “Forbidden”

I’ve found it very useful to catch screen shots via PrintScreen key to Irfan View, or using camera with flash off and macro on if pre- or post-Windows, and pasting these into support emails. 

So what should be easier than to do the same thing here, in blog posts? 

When I last looked at this, it was a fiddly affair, requiring a separate host for the picture files etc. but surely in this pro-Cloud age, those issues should have gone by now.

Apparently not; when trying to publish from Live Writer to this Blogger blog, this failed with “Forbidden”, and remained so until all pictures were removed.

So then I waded through Blogger’s online editor to pull up the pictures into the post.  That worked, for very low values of “work”; pictures were blurry, and the Blogger editor stripped spacing between paragraphs (spacing is always a bit of a sore point with HTML).  What a mess!

Behind the scenes, Blogger stores “blog” pictures in Picasa on the web.  So I logged into that and uploaded the pictures I wanted to use there - then in Writer, I pasted in the picture links from a page where I’d navigated to the pictures I wanted to use.  Still a cumbersome and messy procedure, but at least the text formatting wasn’t screwed up and the pictures look reasonable (as they should; all I want is to show small pictures at original size).

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