Blogger Debuts Google+ Inspired Lightbox Slideshow for Photos

This "feature", imposed without notice and apparently without thorough testing, has broken thousands of blogs, including mine. Some images don't load at all. Others load slowly at a size smaller than the original.

Go to the help forums asking how to disable this feature and experience the anger and dismay over this elegant upgrade. Many bloggers have already customized how their photos are displayed, that work is broken. The lightbox does not function with photos posted prior to 2009, it presents a black screen with a red rectangle in the middle. Bloggers used to be able to post large photos, and readers could zoom in on them, that's gone, too. Blog readers are accustomed to hitting the back button after enlarging a photo, now they must close the viewer by hitting the x, or they leave the blog. For people with slow bandwidth this is a pain, in a blog with many photos, a click to enlarge ONE photo results in having to wait for ALL photos to load in the light box thumbnails. All of this was done inadequate testing, no user feed back and has resulted in general carnage to many blogs. Most IT departments test extensively prior to rolling to production, not this time.

The people in Google should been ashamed of their selves for coming up with a new way to mess up all of our blogs without even a notice to us who paid for a specific platform. Me personally i have created websites for customers through blogger and now they all complaining because they can even show their images! Shame on you Google for embarrassing your customers like that! No more google for me. I'm going to a different platform.

This new "feature" destroyed my astronomical photo blog.

1. It's not possible to see any images in full scale.

2. Hitting the back button kick you out of the blog! (loosing many viewers here...)

3. Older images, than 18 months, are not seen at all, just a tiny red cross.

This is extremely poorly handled by the Google team .

Here is the link to the Blogger Help forum. You can find the html that will disable this "improvement."

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/blogger/thread?tid=73493b0be3a4116d&hl=en

I completely agree with Phyleaux. It is astonishing that this so-called improvement was implemented without any apparent consultation. As others have noted, this new feature, introduced by stealth, has caused a great deal of distress among users who might reasonably have expected to be forewarned. Instead, they find that images in all Blogger blogs are now automatically shown in the lightbox format. Principal among the complaints is that it is no longer possible to zoom in on an image. Those of us who run blogs on art, architecture and astronomy - lovingly built up over many years - have been particularly affected. Secondly, there are problems with some older images not even showing up at all. Thirdly, the interface of the lightbox is unintuitive, and to many users, ugly. Poor show.

A rubbish feature that can not be disabled. It has ruined my Blog!