Farewell Bloggerbot

Christina, the official Picasa spokeswoman on the Picasa Google Groups has formally noted the passing of the Bloggerbot for posting pictures from Picasa's Hello instant messaging program.

The Farewell Bloggerbot post states:

Dear users,

We'd like to thank those of you who have been devoted fans of Bloggerbot -- the photo uploading feature in Picasa's Hello instant messaging program. Unfortunately, Bloggerbot is not compatible with the newest version of Blogger and will no longer upload photos to your blog.

For those of you still using the older version of Blogger, Bloggerbot will continue to work for a short while before being discontinued. At that time, you'll no longer be able to use Bloggerbot to send pictures to your old Blogger account. (And no, if you have already started using the new version of Blogger, you can't revert to the old version just to keep using Bloggerbot. Sorry.)

As an alternative for posting multiple photos at once to your blog, you may want to try Picasa's "BlogThis!" button.  It uploads four photos at a time to your blog. Or, you can directly upload your photos through the Blogger dashboard.

To upload photos through "BlogThis!":
http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=31292

To upload photos through the Blogger Dashboard:
http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=41641&query=upload%20pho...

We're investigating some issues that people have reported when using Picasa's "BlogThis!" button with the new version of Blogger. The known issues are listed here:
http://knownissues.blogspot.com/search/label/blogthis

Please let us know if you see any other problems. As Picasa and Blogger look forward to the New Year, our resolution is to find newer, better ways for you to share photos and videos with your family and friends.

Rest in peace, Bloggerbot. We'll miss you.

Those that used the BloggerBot will notice that the suggested alternatives are not nearly as powerful - in particular the BloggerBot did not have the "4 photos only" restriction.  The passing of Bloggerbot was announced last November.

Bloggerbot to be turned off soon

Michael Lowry reports that he received a message whilst posting to his blog using Hello that Bloggerbot is going away soon.  The full text of the message is

Bloggerbot is going away soon.

Bloggerbot will be turned off by the end of 2006.

Instead try Picasa's "BlogThis!" feature.

(We're working to make it even better.)

As Michael notes, although superficially BlogThis! and the Bloggerbot both do the same thing in allowing you to post pictures to your blog (from Picasa or the companion Hello), the differences at the detail level are such that Bloggerbot users don't want to move to the more limited BlogThis! system.

 The differences include

• The "BlogThis!" window takes up the whole screen, which make it difficult to produce the blog post, which often requires you to consult other windows to collect or check on information as you write.
• Bloggerbot does not limit the number of photos in a blog post, whereas BlogThis! can only cope with 4
• The BlogThis! window is very slow to appear, so you have to sit around and wait for many seconds before you can start your blog post.

Michael also relates in an earlier post how he recently started to get truncated images with Bloggerbot, but Google eventually identified and fixed that problem.

For examples of blog posts that use the ability of Bloggerbot to post an unlimited number of photos at once, check out his "eat, drink and be merry" blog.