The Google+ "Auto Enhance" Photos Feature Is Causing Problems For Some Blog Owners

We're seeing a few questions about photo quality, from blog owners using Picasa photo hosting.

Why do my photos look brighter?

and

Why has the background colours on my pictures changed?

The recently added Google+ "Auto Enhance" and "Auto Awesome" features do not appear to be painless, for some blog owners.

If you have a Google+ account, check out the Settings - Photos section. You'll find two recent additions.

Auto Enhance
Automatically enhance new photos Learn more


Auto Awesome
Create awesome new images from photos in your library Learn more

Interestingly, these settings appear to be enabled automatically for some blogs, without warning to the owners - including a few blogs that are not associated with a Google+ profile.

If your blog contains many photos - and you are concerned with the attention to accuracy / quality of your photos - you might do well to verify this setting, in your Google+ profile.

If you are currently using a Blogger profile with your blog, it's possible that you can edit your Google profile, without Google+. The Google - Settings wizard, under "Photos", supposedly provides a similar setting.

If neither of the above works for you, you are going to have to temporarily setup a Google+ account - then upgrade your blog to use your Google+ profile. From any dashboard display, find the "Gear" icon in the upper right corner of the screen, beneath your personal icon. Clicking on the gear icon, the menu should include

Connect to Google+

Click on "Connect to Google+", and follow instructions - including setting up a Google+ account, if necessary.

Once you have your blog associated with your Google+ profile, find, and de select the "Auto Enhance" and "Auto Awesome" options.

Finally - if you wish - use the Gear icon again, and select "Revert to Blogger profile". Alternately, you might read the writing on the wall, and start using Google+.

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Identifying The Frog - And Other Image Oddities - On The Blog

An occasional sign of confusion, seen occasionally in Blogger Help Forum: Something Is Broken, starts with a simple statement.

There's a frog on my blog!

Those of us who know about third party templates know what's up, here. Given the right browser, you can find the problem, in a couple minutes.

Some third party template providers use separate, third party image hosting services, for serving the graphics used by their templates. Some of the image hosting services, unfortunately, limit their bandwidth. When a given image, that they are serving, exceeds a given amount of bandwidth in a day, or maybe a month, they stop serving the image - maybe the background or another decoration - and they replace it with their logo.

One of these "replacement" logos is the well known PhotoBucket Frog.

If your blog uses one of the more popular templates, provided by the third party service, your readers will find out about it - and you may find out from them.

Why is your blog so plain - and why are there frogs all over the face?

And there is your blog - with no background, and with the frog images.

If you have Firefox, you can use the Media tab in the Tools - "Page Info" wizard. The Media tab displays a quick inventory of all images used, in any web page. Each image is represented by a URL, and a thumbnail. Just open the Media tab, with your blog (and the frogs) displayed, and scan down the list. When you see the frog, look at the URL - and there's the source of your problem.

Then pick another template - maybe a standard Blogger template - and make your blog pretty, again.

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