Warning! Google Album Archive Is Shutting Down — Download Now to Preserve Precious Memories, and Watch Out for Blogger Image Issues

According to Google’s latest announcement, starting July 19, 2023, Google Album Archive (Google Album Archive) will cease to provide its service. The announcement advises users to use the “Google Takeout” feature before mid-July to download a copy of their Album Archive data in order to preserve their personal album content.

From now on, users can view and manage the album content of certain Google products within Album Archive. However, starting July 19, some content accessible only through Album Archive will be permanently deleted. This includes small photo thumbnails, album comments or likes, and a few other cases, some Google Hangouts data in Album Archive, and background images uploaded to the Gmail theme picker before 2018.

To retain access to the above data in the future, Google asks users to use the “Google Takeout” feature to create a copy of the data and download it to their home computer for safekeeping.

Blogger Blogs Should Also Watch Out for Album Links

While browsing Google Album Archive, the author also discovered images that had been inserted into Blogger website posts (as shown in the image below). Since this part is not mentioned in detail in Google’s official guidance, yet the system still shows a warning in the Blogger-specific album.

Blogger Album

Therefore, this is a reminder to Blogger site owners, as well as users who previously migrated their Blogger content to a WordPress blog system: since it is uncertain whether the images used in these articles directly reference files in Google Album Archive, I recommend downloading the image library to a local computer as a backup first, to avoid image breakage problems later on.

If you want to know whether any of your blog posts still use images hosted on Google, you can search for the string “blogspot.com” in your post list. A complete image address will look something like: “http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2JG1ppQ_fcI/USNB69uJN3I/AAAAAAAATKU/Vxd1l1S5ayE/s1600/%E5%B0%8F%E4%B8%89%E7%A9%BA%E8%A5%B2%E8%AD%A6%E5%A0%B1.png”.

In fact, this problem is similar to what the author mentioned in the earlier article “Xuite Random Nest Shuts Down in August: A Complete Guide to Blog Backup, Migration, and Site Transfer” — the images inserted into Xuite articles were also stored in a separate image library location and pulled via randomly generated links, which is equally troublesome. Therefore, special attention should be paid to this part when migrating systems.

This change by Google may have some impact on users’ albums and blog content, so users are advised to carry out the necessary backup and migration measures as early as possible to ensure the safety and continued availability of their data.