Broken links, dead images

I was planning on writing a funny post about an incident that happened during the period last year between the day Bowie was diagnosed with terminal cancer (when my mom's car was rear-ended at a crosswalk as we drove to the vet's) and the day Bowie died (which was also the day repairs to the car were completed.) To do that I wanted to check the post that I wrote about Bowie two and a half months after she died. Upon opening it I discovered that several of the photos in the post were...dead.

A few years ago Blogger introduced a new way of adding photos to your post: drag-and-drop. It was an extension of a functionality that had always existed for their photo posting, a way of hotlinking to an image on the internet. I've never liked doing this, because you never know when the image source is going to be moved or deleted. So up until relatively recently, I've preferred uploading images from my hard drive directly to my blog. It's a tedious, multi-step process, but it feels more reliable.

But drag-and-drop is so fast, so easy. I settled on a compromise: I would only drag-and-drop images from my Facebook page, specifically from Albums on my Facebook page. These photos, I figured, would have stable addresses, and wouldn't be going anywhere.

I was wrong.

The source images never actually moved, mind you. They were still right where they were, next to other photos that had been dragged-and-dropped and were still showing up just fine. Finding them took some effort, though. The names of the missing photos, mostly long streams of numbers, did not match the names of any of the photos in the albums, also long strings of numbers - until I tried to save them. Then the numbers transformed into something else. Two of those strings of numbers transformed into strings that matched the missing images.

I went through seven years of posts and found that most of the posts with missing photos were from 2017. Some posts from 2011 appear to be broken in a different way - the uploaded images are still in the posts but don't display. That's an investigation for another time.

Here are the posts currently missing images. I'll try to replace them with uploaded versions of the same images.

https://anothermonkey.blogspot.com/2017/03/clouds-moon-and-venus-march-1-2017.html

https://anothermonkey.blogspot.com/2017/03/july-17-2016-pale-white-disk-in-pewter.html
(fixed June 4, 2018)

https://anothermonkey.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-tomatoes-of-2016.html
(fixed June 4, 2018)

https://anothermonkey.blogspot.com/2017/02/see-crescent-of-venus.html

https://anothermonkey.blogspot.com/2017/04/national-poetry-month-brian-fanelli.html

And here's one with the images present but not visible:

https://anothermonkey.blogspot.com/2011/06/world-of-wonders-sideshow-at-northeast.html