symptoms

Doctor! Good to see you. Boy, have I got some problems for you.

Okay, here's the deal.

I had about 180 photos on my phone, see? Pictures I just took while on a long walk this past weekend. Seoul to Yangpyeong. Nice walk. Anyway, I took a lotta pics, but I've been trying not to max out my phone's storage space, so I've been dumping my pics into Google Drive. The phone's got an "upload to Drive" function, so I've been using that to empty out my phone periodically. Via Wi-Fi.

So I uploaded all my walk pics, plus a few extra pics, just yesterday. They're sitting in Drive; I can open up Drive on my Chrome browser, at home or at work, and see all the pics, so I know they're all there.

What I wanted to do was display all these walk pics on my blog, in a blog post. Should've been easy, right? Just open Blogger's task screen up, create a blank post, click "upload image," select "upload from Drive," then select all 180 or so pics. Simple.

But, no—Blogger won't let you upload directly from Drive, despite it being a Google product like Drive is. Once I realized this, I knew I needed a workaround, so here's what I did: I selected a pic on Drive—just one pic, the first of the whole bunch—and right-clicked to obtain its shareable URL. I copied that URL to the clipboard. I then went over to Blogger, hit "upload image," hit "upload from URL," then pasted the URL into the field.

So far, so good. A preview shot of the image came up in Blogger, so I assumed all was well. I clicked "add image," and voila: HTML appeared in my Blogger blog-post edit window. When I hit "preview" to see whether the image was carrying over, I saw the image had indeed carried over. Still fine thus far.

I published the post with a bit of text. When I tabbed over to my blog on my office desktop to see whether the image had posted, I saw that it... had not. When I right-clicked on the image to track down what was going on, I got a "forbidden" message—unable to access that URL. How this is possible, I have no idea.

I went back to Drive to track down the photo I had uploaded, and now I couldn't find the damn photo. It was gone. Lost forever. No longer part of the collection of photos in Drive. Where it went, I have no clue.

Except the lost photo wasn't gone. It was no longer in the main collection of photos, but it was visible, as if it were taunting me, in the "recent" section of that photo folder. What gives?

So when I acquire a shareable link for a photo in Drive, the photo disappears from the collection but somehow remains in the "recent" section of the folder. It's no longer where it should be when I display my photos in order of filename. Basically, the photo is now out of order, and I imagine that's going to happen with every single photo I attempt to get a shareable link for. If that's the case—and I have to get these shareable links one by one because there's no way to grab them as a group—then how the hell am I supposed to keep track of what file is where? Google Drive sucks, Doc. It's beyond primitive.

What's the prescription, then? I'm guessing that we have to go old-school: download all the photos onto a computer, then re-upload them to the blog via the standard Blogger way (i.e., upload from computer drive, not via URL). And since I apparently can't download from Drive in batches, I have to download all 180 files individually.

Do you concur with this assessment, Doctor?

I guess I'll get on that tonight.