Beware---you can break your blog

I'm sorry to interrupt the chronicle of our daily lives but I am having a major blogging crisis.  Sadly, I have learned it's possible to break your blog.  It can be fixed but it is NOT easy.  I only share my story so that hopefully it doesn't happen to one of you.  Honestly, I sort of wish it did happen to one of you first, that way I could be reading about this on your blog and then avoid doing it myself.  Oh well, I guess I'm taking one for the team.  (Unless of course, you are a savvy and well informed blogger and already know this stuff.)  I might also mention, that if I had been following Blogger message boards, I would have known about this, because apparently I am like the one millionth person to do this!

So what happened?  It all started when I reached my "photo upload quota."  Did you know you have a quota?  Well, you do.  Once you reach the quota, you have to pay for extra storage space.  Nothing is ever free, but I was willing, I mean I have dedicated 3 years, countless hours and over 1,000 photos to this blog.  I'm not giving it up now.  In the process of updating my storage space, I learned that all your photos are stored in albums over on Picasa (didn't know that before.)  You have to log into Picasa to increase your storage space, well while I was doing this I saw that all my photos on Picasa were public.  I start thinking, not sure I want all my pictures out there so public, they are public enough on my blog, so I changed the Picasa web album setting to private.  Okay read this carefully:  DO NOT CHANGE YOUR SETTING because when you do this, you break the link between the Picasa album and your blog.  THIS MEANS YOUR PICTURES WILL NO LONGER APPEAR ON YOUR BLOG.  AND THE ONLY WAY TO REESTABLISH THE LINK IS TO RELOAD THEM ONE BY ONE BACK ON YOUR BLOG.  Just changing your setting back does not work.

Are you serious!!!!!???   Do you realize what I am saying:  I have to go back into my blog and upload every single photo again.  (Insert tears, gnashing of teeth, screaming, swear words, etc.)  The only thing that kept me from hurting myself was that by some strange chance only about 1 year's worth of photos were lost, the other two years are still appearing.  So instead of reloading and captioning over 1500 photos, I ony have to do about 600.  Aren't I lucky? 

I did immediately slurp my blog into blurb so that I have a copy of the undamaged part of my blog for printing.  I have decided at this point to repair the links for the last year.  If by chance the other links stop working, I am not going to go back and reload the pictures.
Aren't I lucky?