google disabled blogger's image viewer

I am quite bummed with a recent changed by Google to the Blogger's image viewing capability. Some observant readers of my blog might also noticed and missed this feature.

Long before I decided to write my own blog I used to spend a lot of time viewing photos on Flickr's slide show function. However with very large groups I noticed how sucky Flickr is. You cannot pause at the photo that you have view and come back and resume from where you left off the next time.

I was quite happy with Google's Blogger (it is where I develop and host my blog) in general, and especially how user friendly and ease of use to write blog post. The best part is I can include photos and images of generous size (typically 1200x800 in my case) and Blogger allow you to set them at a smaller (defaults to medium) size in the post unless the reader elects to see the larger versions.


In the last week inexplicably Google's Blogger team decided to disabled the reader's ability to cycle through all the images (photos) on a blog post in somewhat of a slideshow fashion. The way it works is once you are in a blog post you can click on any image. Doing this would launch the image viewer in the same web browser page. The reader will see the larger version of the image (typically 1200x800 in my posts). Additionally the thumbnails of all the other images are shown on the bottom. One can advance to the next image by simply click on the large image, or just use your arrow keys to navigate forward or backward. You can also select to view any photo by clicking on the specific thumbnail. To exist the viewer you can either click on the exit button on the screen, or simply press the ESC key. Immediately you are back to the same position of the post.

Now with the image viewer disabled it really sucks if you want to see the larger version of an image. If you click on an image of the post you only get to see the larger version of that specific image. You can no longer cycle through the images as before. Worst yet you have to back page on your browser to come back to the post. Doing this also land you back to the top of the post, instead of where you were at in the post.

I contacted Google via the send feedback and as I expected no one get back to me.

The only reason I can think of why Google disable this feature. They somehow don't want people to use their Blogger to replace their Picasa.

I put in some random photos below so the reader may try to see what I mean that now the image viewer is disabled.

Update 7:57 am Mar 26 - it seems Google fixed the return back to previous place in the post when one done with viewing the larger image, at least with some web browsers.

Update Apr 4 - I am happy to report that Google has restored the image viewer function; I now assume it was a victim of unintended software glitch that is so common these days. Let's hope this function stays for the time to come.

this is what the image viewer screen should look when you click on any image on my blog posts - there are the thumbnails of all the images/photos in the post you can thumb through