I looked at a few old entries here at my eJournal and images. I noticed that really old blog entries from this site load pictures differently. Rather than pointing to my old, active domain server, it seems as though Google has them cached. For example, here's a screen capture from January 2006. (One can easily view any month since September 2003, by scrolling to the bottom of any normal browser page and selecting an archive month from the dropdown box.)
I wrote to the blogger community forums to ask for a bit of help and information. Here's the conversation:
Hi Dennis S. Hurd,
Your question has been posted to the Blogger Community.
Most questions receive a reply within 24 hours. We'll send you an email notification when this happens.
https://dennissylvesterhurd.blogspot.com/2006/02/did-you-hear-one-about.html
This is an example post with an image never hosted by Google. I originally used to run on my own server when that was an option. The image still points to a personal domain.
1) Is this a real proxy and if so is the image permanently cached by Google?
2) Will Google maintain this image if I abandon the personal domain it used to load from?
I have been meaning to move old images off the personal domain site as for years and years I've been embedding from Flickr. Now it'd be tough as copying just provides 'unnamed' as the jpg name.
I'm hoping that when I shut down my old domain, the images will stay available. I've only missed a few days of blogging since 2003 and wish to maintain the years between 2004 and 2008 hasslefree.
Your question received a new reply:
Gold Product Expert
Nigel ( @stwNigel )
Hi Dennis S. Hurd ,
Good observation.
Yes. Blogger does cache the images linked in Blogger blogs.
You can test it live by adding image from external domain to the HTML or Image gadget on Blogger. You will see the rendered image will be served from googleusercontent.com.
It is unlikely that Google will store the image permanently especially since they do not provide a way to manage images hosted from googleusercontent.com. So it is very possible that they will automatically refresh the cache at some point and URLs of image loaded from googleusercontent may change over time.
So I suggest you yo backup the images in the personal domain.
Best,
Nigel
Original Poster - Dennis S. Hurd
Thank you for taking the time to answer my message.
I had sort of hoped to hear that these images would remain indefinitely as they form a crucial part of my blog. I would feel bad knowing a half-decade of posts might suddenly start loading without images.
I have backup copies of the very old images but having to re-edit each and every reference inside each post would prove too arduous even for someone with a lot of time on their hands. My naming convention used to be mmddyy.jpg which was not smart as it makes grouping them in any logical order hard too.
Freshly copying a month at a time used to be easy as I could save the images presented when viewing the blog by simply 'copying' from the screen. Now, of course, they come back with names 'unnamed (1) jpg etc.
Sigh. If you ever learn more about the way content such as this will be handled, I'd love to be informed.
Again, thanks.