Meta post: Google ate Picasa, married Blogger, and had a G+ baby.

As I was reviewing the photos from my previous post yesterday, I realized that they were not displaying on Blogger correctly.  I compared the images in Photoshop to the ones displayed on Blogger, and there were harsh differences in brightness/contrast in some, and subtle differences in others.

I realized that when I uploaded images to Blogger, they were being "Auto Enhanced" by Google.  To "improve" them.  That doesn't exactly work with what I was trying to do, which was to examine subtle differences of images straight out of camera!

I dug through Blogger settings trying to find a way to turn this "feature" off, and couldn't find a single thing about photos in there.  I eventually did a Google search and found that these settings are located in my Google+ settings.

Of course! Why didn't I think of that?

So, the images I upload to Blogger actually go into an album in G+.  In the past, Blogger was linked to Picasa, which of course is now nonexistent as a standalone service.  It's now part of G+.  So I think I subconsciously knew this was where my photos were being stored, but had never had reason to try to work with the images after posting them to Blogger before.

I logged into G+, went into the Settings, and turned off the Auto Enhance option for new photos (which I was fairly sure I had already done in the past).  Interestingly, no options were selected in my account.  Neither "Off" nor "On" or anything else was selected - none of the radio buttons were highlighted.  So now it's definitely set to "Off."

I then found that I was able to select all the images that I had ever posted to this blog, and turn off the auto enhancement en masse.  Great!

Except that this didn't update the blog images right away.  It was only several hours later that the images on the blog magically fixed themselves.  I was thinking I'd have to recreate the blog post, but I'm glad to see that I don't have to do that.

I'll have to re-evaluate the results of my experiment, now that the results are untainted!  :)

Click here to check out that post, with images restored to their original glory (ahem).