MORE Technical Difficulties Thanks to Google...

Google has made another un-announced change, disabling uploading of images to Picasa/Google+ albums unless you're using Google+ instead of Google.
Last week they disabled editing in Google+ Photos unless you use the Chrome browser, and when we finally were able to access it after loading and initializing Chrome, discovered they had eliminated some features (including showing file size, resolution, and image dimensions) from the editing software!
(We worked out a new editing system and are back on track with that)
Because our albums are spread out over three different user names, only one of which is on Google +, we'll have to work out what to do.
Because moving the albums from one user name to another would break the existing links to the blogs, that option is out of the question.
Hopefully, we'll be back tomorrow...

No Post Today Due to Google / Picasa Problems Redux

Due to problems with Picasa, we'll be unable to do our scheduled post for today.
Whenever we try to access Picasa, a popup forcing us to join Google+ or we can't access our albums "pops-up"!
We hope to resolve the problem (or figure out a workaround) by Monday.
Thank you for your patience.

No Post Today Due to Google / Picasa Problems

Due to problems with Picasa, we'll be unable to do our scheduled post for today.
Whenever we try to access Picasa, a popup forcing us to join Google+ or we can't access our albums "pops-up"!
We hope to resolve the problem (or figure out a workaround) by Monday.
Thank you for your patience.

Problems with Blogger and Picasa

Due to Google forcing us to use a new, and extremely-buggy version of the Blogger interface and new problems with Google's usually-reliable Picasa photo-editing software, we're unable to post our scheduled story today.
Sorry.

Problem with Images on Picasa...

I just discovered that my image host, Picasa, has changed it's policy and software implementation.
Images I deliberately scaled to 750 pixels high for reasonable readibility and small file size now automatically-default to only 512 pixels high!
To demonstrate, here's an example from what would've been today's post...

 The way it used to be.

The way it is now...

As a Google employee explains HERE...

If you manually edit our embed URLs to remove the size parameter, we now default to using a 512 pixel width image. We made this change to help us continue working to improve how we serve photos across Google, including on Blogger and other sites.

It would've been nice if they gave us a heads-up before doing this.
(And, it's the height, not the width that defaults to 512!
A 512-pixel width wouldn't be that bad for most of my post images, which are usually 510-550 pixels wide!)
As it stands, I've fixed the most recent posts on all the other RetroBlogs™, but it's going to be a little while (probably after the holidays) before I can go in and fix older entries!
This particular blog is being redesigned, but I'm not implementing the change until after New Year's Day, 2012, when things slow down enough for me to begin refitting older entries to look better in the new format.

I apologize if this impacts your enjoying the RetroBlogs™.