SITREP

My fellow Bloggers, an important date is looming on the horizon: May 1, 2016. On this date Google is officially retiring Picasa Web Albums and transitioning to Google Photos, as described in this post. Of course, the devil is in the details: In paragraph four it describes how the existing Picasa Web Albums will be moved to a newly created place. As established in this post about how Steam moved their service, the end result could be cataclysmic for this blog.

The problem is that approximately 95% of the posts on RangerX3X have images that were inserted via a long standing integrated linking capability between Blogger and Picasa Web Albums. If in the transition to the “new place” the URL of any image changes with the move from Picasa to Google, those image links will be broken, which will in turn wreck hundreds of entries on this blog.

I love gaming, I love blogging, and for the most part (as tedious as it can be) I like to blog about my gaming (the entire purpose of this site I suppose). But to be candid, I do not have a desire to go back to each post to restore the image content because of a decision that was made completely outside of my control.

Sure I could have used a third party image hosting service all along, but the potential loss of content is no different than what has already happened with Steam and will happen with Picasa Web Albums.

Edit 3/27/16: This has already happened to users of X-Fire, a service that permanently deleted hundreds of thousands of screen shots and videos with little advance notice to the community.

There is simply no guarantee (zero, nada, not a chance) that the URL of an image will not change over time.

Unless some tech head genius devises and successfully implements a method to auto-update all image URL’s, it is probable that on May 1, 2016 images that exist in the posts of this blog will show as broken links.