Better Photo Uploading

We recently updated the photo uploading interface in Blogger in Draft’s post editor with a few new features:

• Multiple photo upload. If you have Flash installed, you can select multiple photos at a time in the file picker, and all of them will get uploaded at once.
• Picasa Web Albums integration. You can now select from any of the images in your Picasa Web photo albums and insert them into your posts.

Tips from the Blogger Team:

• You can upload multiple images at once, but then only insert them into your post one-at-a-time. When you re-open the image picker the photos you uploaded before will still be there. This gives you the most control over where your images go, while still keeping the upload process convenient.
• Take advantage of the Picasa Web Albums integration. If you use Picasa to manage your photos on your computer, you can automatically sync your photos to Picasa Web Albums and then pick them right from the post editor. Not using Picasa? You should try it! It’s a free download for Windows, Mac, or Linux. (iPhoto users: Try the free Picasa Web Albums Uploader that works with directly with iPhoto.)
• Your uploaded photos will still be there even if you close and re-open the post editor. With the old uploader, images only stuck around in the picker for your current editing session. Now you can upload everything when you start writing your post without worrying about losing any work.
• Caption your images. We recently added captions to the post editor on Blogger in draft. While this isn’t directly related to the new uploader, it’s a nifty feature that you should try out if you haven’t yet. Find out more

A note on the Picasa Web Albums integration: 


We’ve actually been storing and serving your blog’s images from Picasa Web Albums for a few years, but we haven’t taken full advantage of that integration until now. You may see photos that you uploaded in the past but you never ended up using in a post, but don’t let that alarm you: Blogger always uploads images to an Unlisted photo album. That means that unless you log in to Picasa Web Albums directly and share the photos, the only place they’d ever be seen by anybody is on your blog. Learn more about Picasa Web Albums’ privacy settings

If you do want to clear out those unused images, you can log in to Picasa Web Albums and delete them, but be careful: deleting photos from Picasa Web Albums will remove them from your blog if they’ve been used in a post. So if you’re going to delete, only delete what you’re sure never got posted.

Let us know what you think!


We apologize for the bit of a rocky release this feature had last week, and we’re still tidying up some remaining problems. (We’ve heard reports of the uploader not working in Safari, which our engineers are looking into.) If the photo uploader is not working for you, please let us know in the comments what browser, operating system, and version of Flash (if any) you’re using. Then, if you need to upload photos, use the editor on www.blogger.com. (You can switch to “Updated editor” in Settings > Basic and get most of the features from Blogger in draft, but the older photo uploader.)

It wouldn't be Blogger in Draft if we weren’t trying out new things and listening to your reactions, so please give it a try and tell us what you think.

Improvements to Blogger In Draft's Text Editor

by Jiho Han, Software Engineer

We've made a couple of improvements to the Text Editor on Blogger in Draft! 

Add captions to your photos 

Now you can easily add captions to the images you include in your blog posts! To add a caption, simply click on the image you've inserted, and click Add caption.

Then you can write your caption just below the image. 

Expandable Edit Region

In addition to captions, we've recently added another new feature for you verbose bloggers out there. You can now expand the text area of the editor to give yourself more room as you type. To make the editor region larger, simply click the corner of the editor and drag it down.

The editor window will also grow automatically as you run out of space.

Faster Video Uploading

Your time is very important to us, and we are continuously working to make your experience on Blogger fast and easy. We know that it's no fun waiting for your videos to upload, so we've recently made speed improvements to make your videos upload faster.

Let us know what you think of these features in the comments below, and thanks for using Blogger!

Look Up Words as You Compose

by Awaneesh Verma, Dictionary Product Manager

We recently added a dictionary with definitions and translations to "Blogger in Draft." Here's a quick tour of the feature and its functions.

Look up definitions: To look up the definition of a word or phrase, simply highlight it and click the dictionary icon in the editor's toolbar:

This will open the dictionary's Define tab, where you can view definitions for words and phrases across 12 languages.

Get synonyms: If you'd like to see synonyms for an English word, begin by looking up its definition as above. Then, click a hyperlinked synonym to browse to its definition, and click Insert or Replace to add the currently displayed word to your composition:

Currently, synonyms are available only in the English dictionary.

Translate: You can use the Translate tab of the dictionary to translate words and phrases between over 50 languages.

Similar to the Define tab, you can navigate translations by clicking them and can feed them back to the post by clicking Insert.
We hope you find this dictionary a useful composition tool. Please let us know what you think by leaving us a comment below. Thanks!