Sunday, April 12, 2009

Worse than I thought...see yesterday's posting.

I just found this on Picasa:

When you delete photos and folders in Picasa, they are deleted from your computer's hard drive as well. Deleted items are sent to the Recycle bin (Windows) or the Trash (Mac). Deleting photos from Picasa will not remove them from Picasa Web Albums.

Emphasis my own. They won't let go.

Paddle safe...
DS
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4 comments:

Michael said...

Interesting thread Dick. I haven't had a chance to re-read the disclaimer when one signs on to Blogger (Google), but it seems to me they'd be shooting themselves in the foot if they somehow tried to 'steal' everyone's photos in the way you suggest. On the other hand, I know they archive everything which enables a person to retrieve stuff (even blogs no longer being published can be accessed which can be useful sometimes). Let's keep on this one and see where it leads...!

1:40 PM
bonnie said...

Oof. You gave me a bit of a turn, there...but I think what may be going on here is that there are 2 different Picasa products.

As was mentioned in a comment on your last post about this, there's Picasa the photo management software. This is a thing that you download & put on your computer to manage your software. Early on in the pre-Google Blogger days, that was given as one of about 3 ways you could put pictures on your blog. I tried to download it to the "antique" (circa 2000 or so, sad that that's antique) I was using until just this last December. A big happy-face logo appeared on my screen with a "Searching for all pictures on your hard drive". I let it run overnight & when it was still on the same happy-face "searching" page when I woke up the next morning, I shut down the computer & when I got home that night, I went into the programs area & uninstalled the thing.

I ended up using the Buzznet photo-sharing site for pictures until the "upload photo" feature was added (plus Buzznet went all niche & became the photosharing site of choice of the pink-haired emo youth set, and I am none of the above).

If you have that software on your computer & you ask it to delete a picture, it's going to delete it from your computer.

And as it said, it's NOT going to delete it from Picasa Web Albums, which is an online photo-sharing site, very similar to Flickr.

http://picasaweb.google.com/home

Since Google took over Blogger, it seems that every Blogger blog has a matching Picasa Web Albums account. Photos uploaded using Blogger are stored in an album on that site. You can sign on there with the same user name & ID as you do for your blog. You'll see an album there - in that album, you'll see every photo you've ever uploaded to your blog. All the pictures in there are categorized as "private", the only place other people can see them is on your blog.

I went into an album I'd set up myself with some pictures I'd uploaded (they were for a post I never ended up doing & were unimportant enough to be disposable) & deleted one, just to see for sure. As I was hoping, it deleted it from the album. It didn't say anything about the hard drive. The copy saved on the web album site - it's as gone as anything put on the internet ever is.

If I had ever put up the post I was going to illustrate with that photo, you'd still see the post, but the picture would just be that little red "x" indicating something's missing.

Google's motto is "Don't be evil" - setting up Blogger so that you could never ever delete a picture from your blog without Google reaching into your hard drive would be just that.

It would be nice if they had a little explanation on the upload window that said "The pictures you are uploading are being saved to a Picasa web album with the sharing options set to 'Private'", maybe with a link to the album, wouldn't it?

There, clear as mud, I expect.

10:25 PM
DaveO said...

Hmmmm......I just upload the damn things from my photo archives. I've never used any of those programs. I'm too computer ignorant to know if I've been unwittingly smart or whether its just my usual wariness about 'new' programs, combined with my natural sloth, that makes me do it this way. Any thoughts??

6:57 AM
Silbs said...

All great thoughts; and I saw the statement that said the folders/pics would be removed from my hard drive.

Now think about it: I have checked the box so the pics are essentially my copy right. Why then would they keep them for ever? This whole thing has taken something out of me. Perhaps it is a trust issue.

7:57 AM

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