BloggerBot is still cutting photos in half

BloggerBot is my primary method of posting to my blogs, but recently it has become unreliable.

Lately, BloggerBot has been cutting photos in half when I post them. I find that I must re-post photos before the they appear intact on the blog. Sometimes, even 5 or 6 attempts to upload the same image results in the image being cut off at exactly the same place each time. Every time an image upload fails, this results in wasted time for me, and wasted storage space on photos1.blogger.com.

That's not all though. It gets worse. Because there's no way add a new blog entry as a draft when posting via BloggerBot, the corrupted photos go straight to the blog without my having any chance to review the post to check for completeness first. There's no way to know if a photo was posted successfully before the potentially corrupt photos are already on the blog. Only once I refresh the blog do I know if one of the photos is corrupt; and by that time, the eyesore is already visible on my blog for the whole world to see.

Furthermore, often the thumbnail image visible on the blog is complete, but the full-size image linked to by the thumbnail is corrupt. There's no way to tell which full-size images are corrupt without clicking on each thumbnail image individually.

The problem can happen any time photos are posted via Hello and BloggerBot, regardless of whether the photos are sent to Hello from Picasa. Therefore, the problem is not likely to be the result of the recent Picasa update. Hello has not been updated in many months, so it seems equally unlikely that the problem lies with Hello. I get the impression that BloggerBot is the source of the problem.

BloggerBot, once a great time-saver, is now making the task of posting to a blog too time conuming to be worth the effort.

I posted a message describing the problem to the online Picasa forum a week ago, and since then others have reported the same problem.

Hey Blogger guys: please fix this!

Update 18 October 2006: The fine folks at Blogger have identified and fixed the problem. Thanks!