How NOT To Add Photos

[June 2006 Update: So, the AOL Pictures team went in and implemented permalinks, so this entry is pretty much moot. See my entry on how you can use AOL Pictures permalinks to put big pictures in your blog.]

Hi folks...here's a question that I get pretty regularly: "I
put some photos in my Journal, and now they're gone! Where'd they go? I
hate you: You suck!" (The last part is usually implied, if
not explicitly stated.)

The usual reason that this
happens involves doing something with AOL Pictures (neé YGP) that
you're not supposed to do, in the sense that the
product folks never thought people would try to do this, so they didn't
plan for it.

Now, let me stress that it's
not your fault, it's our fault because we
don't tell you that you're not supposed to use the product this way, so
you do it and it works -- for a little bit.

Here's
what happens:

1. A Journaler uploads a
photo to their AOL Pictures album and they
want to put that photo in their Journal (either in their "All About Me"
area or in an entry), but they don't want the AOL
Pictures border or frame around the picture.

2. So, what they do is look at the picture displayed in their
album, then they right-click and hit "Copy Image
Location":

The
URL will be long and ugly and it will look something
like this:
http://shutter03.pictures.aol.com/data/pictures/02/003/6B/45/DB/9B/KA... 
(trimmed because it's making the page too wide; it's that long) -- it's a direct link to the photo of a duct that's in one of my
albums. (Note that this link will stop working after
a while -- could be days, weeks or months, but it will eventually stop
working)

3. Then, having copied the photo's
URL, they will go to create or edit their Journal entry, hit
the little camera button

in the formatting toolbar (which is for adding images to your blog,

without the border -- all you need is to paste in the photo's

location), and paste in the photo's URL that they
copied:

4.
Success! Until the image disappears later on, that
is.

The problem with inserting
photos in this way is that the image location URLs for the photos in
your albums aren't permanent, static URLs; they can
change over time as files are migrated, new servers are added, etc.




The photos will still be in your album, they'll just have a
different address, and because the address changed,
it will disappear from your
blog.

Why does this happen? I
think it's because it's a legacy architecture, which
is to say that it was designed that way -- it works fine if you're just
using it to share photo albums, but it doesn't work
so good if you're trying to use it for hosting
images in your Web page or blog -- it just wasn't designed
for it.

Obviously, we want the AOL Pictures and
Journals products to play nice together, so we're
going to try to find ways to fix this experience, involving proxies or
pointers or guys with clipboards or something.

This just in: Check out this entry on the AOL Pictures blog about permalinks -- that sounds about like what we want.

In
the meantime, what you should do to ensure that this doesn't
happen to you?

The best
way is to upload your photo to your FTP
space using the File
Manager (check out my tutorial
on using File Manager), copy the image
location after you've uploaded it to your FTP space,
and paste it in using the camera button
method (#3 above).

Hope this all makes
sense.  Also, you might want to check out the AOL Pictures
blog, which is AOL Pictures
- Tips & Tricks.

Thanks, talk to
you later. -- Joe