Open Live Writer Photo Problem

If you are like us and use Open Live Writer (OLW) as your blog post editor then you may have recently experienced a problem publishing posts from OLW if they have photos.  From my research it appears Google have made one or more changes which has resulted in posts containing photos being rejected.  Specifically, Google is closing down Picasa and moving to Google Photos.  OLW is programmed to work with Picasa.  Therefore the OLW developers will need to modify OLW.  This is just another example of Google forcing people to use their products.

I think I’ve found a rather clunky work around.

STEPS

1.  Load Blogger and create a new post

2.  Insert all the photos you want in OLW into this new Blogger post (don’t enter text and don’t save the post.  No requirement to give it a title as it’s only temporary.

3.  Load OLW and create your new post.  When you reach a point where you want to insert a photo change to Blogger and right click on the photo you want to insert.  Select the option “Copy image address”.

4.  Go back to OLW and select the picture icon on the toolbar.  Select the “From the web” option and paste the address you copied from Blogger.  The selected image should appear in the preview box

5.  Click the “insert” button.  The image should now appear in your post.

6.  When you have inserted all your photos then close and delete the draft post in Blogger

7.  You can now complete and publish your OLW post.

Effectively what you are doing is transferring your photo into a Google product (eg, Blogger) where is obtains a Google API.  Then your are transferring the photo address (and approved API) to OLW.  Google Blogger then accepts the post.

This is a longish work around but I do find OLW a better editor than Blogger.

So here’s my test photo.

I don’t particularly like the man’s moral compass but I did find this funny.