How to Improve The Photo Quality of Pictures on Blogger Blogs

I've been using Blogger for my personal and professional blogs since forever.  Despite all the negativity surrounding its use, and the claims that "no professional blogger should ever use it", I've had success, and generally, I really enjoy the tools it offers.

One major peeve of having a blog on Blogger, however, is that uploaded photos automatically get compressed when uploading, causing them to be grainy, blurry, or generally gross.  This happens inconsistently.  One day, your photos will turn out spendidly.  Other times, it looks like you snapped them with a kids' camera out of a cereal box.  Here is a work-around to the issue:

Since I first researched this topic, many automatic updates have been made to the Blogger uploader, making some of these steps redundant.  I'll explain them to you in full, then let you decide if you can skip some steps.

1.  If you don't already have a Google Picasa Album and software, get one.  Most likely, if you have Gmail, you just need to grant permissions to the online version of Picasa.  Then download the software for your PC or Mac here.

2.  Once the software has installed, and all your photos have been indexed (which takes a few minutes), you can select the photos you want to upload to your Blogger blog from the software.  To do this, click on the photo in the preview pane and then click the "Upload" button on the bottom of the screen.  You will be asked to select the photo size/quality.  Be sure to choose Original (slowest upload.)


3.  Now that it's been uploaded, you can access it in your online album.  To do this, you can click on the photo again, right click, and select "Online Options."  From there, you will select "View Online."  It will open up your browser to the place where that particular photo is stored.


4.  You can now choose the "Link to this Photo" option on the right-hand side.  Make sure that "Hide Album Link" only is checked.  Copy the embed code and paste it into your blog post.


Shortcut:  While this doesn't ALWAYS work, sometimes it can be a lifesaver.  You can skip steps 3-5 by using your Blogger photo uploader (like you always do) in your posts and instead of uploading directly from your computer, use the"From Picasa Web Albums" feature.  You should be able to preview all of your uploaded items from this window, and select the one that you want to embed.  You may have to adjust the size of the photo to get the quality and size that you want.  (Be sure to use "preview post" to find this out.)


You should see an immediate improvement of your photos over the original method.  While it's not necessary to replace all of your old photos (it might actually ruin some of the Google Image indexing of your photos to do so), you can replace the most obviously fuzzy ones or recent ones that are important to you.  And you most definitely will want to do this with high-res photos you care about moving forward.  (iPhone pics?  Not so much.)

What about you?  Have you found that Blogger has been compromising the quality of your pics?  Does this tutorial help?

*Special thanks to Gee, a Priest! for getting me going on the right path with this post. 

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