Oh dear. 90% of my blog photos are gone - why you should be careful deleting images on your Android phone if you use Blogger.

Me and technology aren't doing very well lately.  About 6 weeks after my 3 month old Samsung Galaxy Note met the Mexican sea, I finally got a replacement phone back on my insurance (hurrah!) and set about adding my contacts, apps etc. and generally making it my phone again.  I downloaded the Blogger app as I find it easier to put together a skeleton of a post if I'm out and about.  I also logged into my Google account to keep everything updated.  While I was checking some photos I noticed that there were a number of folders in there already that contained some (not all) of my blog owners).  I assumed that these were just copies over when I downloaded the Blogger app and deleted them.  Um, I was wrong. 

Did you know that when you upload photos to Blogger, it doesn't save them into Blogger, it saves them into Picasa web albums?  I sort of did but didn't think anything of it.  Picasa web albums also automatically synchronises with your Android phone.  Note I said synchronise...not copy, so anything you do to these images on your Android copies over to your Picasa web album.  I didn't see a warning or a notification about this anywhere, and never for one minute did I think they would be interconnected so much.  Until I checked my blog the day after and noticed that I had a lot of black exclamation marks where most of my images should be.

Googling around finally informed me that this was the case and that it's  not reversible, as in these images (3 years worth) are gone forever from my blog.  I spent Sunday morning trying to recover lost photos from my Android, looking for cached pages to re-image from and generally just stabbing in the dark trying to sort it.  None of this worked so the way I see it I have a few options:

1. Delete the blog and either start again from scratch or stop blogging
2. Leave it as it is and update the images from this point forward
3. Go back and replace every photo that I have a copy of - my laptop died last year taking a few of them with it - and hope Google Images can sort the ones I haven't got.  Bear in mind my blog has been going for about 3 years and it's most of the images that have gone
4. Give up on this technology lark and start keeping a paper diary that I leave hanging around at bus stops and the like in the hope that someone might pick it up and have a read 

None of these options are ideal and I haven't decided what to do just yet - probably not number 4 though.  To say I'm annoyed would be a massive understatement.  But it's been my mistake and as much as I think it's rubbish that there was no warning that images were synched, that there's no way to get anything back and that this isn't something that people seem to know anything about until it's too late, it was my mistake.  But I'm absolutely not the only person that this has happened to.  I think in future I'll be a lot more careful about my images and not just assume someone else is looking after them too.

If anyone has any tips, ideas, experience or just general sympathy on this issue I'd really really appreciate it!