The Future of Blogger and MarsEdit

February 13th, 2019

I have bad news for MarsEdit users who publish to Blogger: Google is shutting down the Picasa Web Albums API, and MarsEdit will no longer be able to upload images to Blogger/Blogspot blogs.

I had anticipated being able to switch to the Google Photos API, and put a substantial amount of working into transitioning to that service. Unfortunately, I’ve since learned that Google does not provide the same interface to Blogger albums via Google Photos that they did via the Picasa API. Furthermore, images uploaded separately to Google Photos albums cannot be embedded into other web content such as a blog post.

Uploading images to Blogger has never been straightforward. Since I first added support for Blogger almost 12 years ago, I have needed to jump through hoops to support image uploads for the service. Their API has never directly supported image uploads, but I had been able to accommodate solutions using Picasa’s API.

Without support for uploading media, I can no longer endorse Blogger as a suitable blogging service for MarsEdit users. After March 15, 2019, I will update MarsEdit to remove Blogger as a supported system. I have not yet decided whether I can leave some form of support in the app to accommodate folks who are satisfied to continue blogging without the ability to add images to their posts.

This is a very disappointing development, but it sort of comes with the territory for an app such as MarsEdit that supports a variety of services, none of which is under my control. Over the past 12 years, I’ve witnessed the disappearance of services such as Vox and Posterous, and the elimination of support for 3rd party apps by services such as Squarespace.

For customers with Blogger blogs who wish to continue using MarsEdit, I recommend switching to a service with full-featured image upload support. WordPress is a good alternative, which has always been supportive of 3rd-party apps such as MarsEdit. Because it is based on open source software, even if one hosting service were to go away or eliminate access, there would undoubtedly be other services offering suitable WordPress-based hosting.

7 Responses to “The Future of Blogger and MarsEdit”

  1. Roger Says:

    This is unfortunate news. However, I was thinking that for those who use other services to host photos (like Flickr), MarsEdit would still be a viable platform. Would it be possible to not support native uploading of images – but still keep Blogger available for those who don’t use that feature?

  2. Michael Leddy Says:

    “I have not yet decided whether I can leave some form of support in the app to accommodate folks who are satisfied to continue blogging without the ability to add images to their posts.”

    Daniel, please do if it”™s at all possible. Anyone without a Google+ profile (like me) has already been using MarsEdit without the ability to upload images. I just go into the Blogger composing window to upload an image.

    I bought MarsEdit last September and (as you may remember) raved about it on my blog. It”™s made the work of writing Blogger posts a pleasure – and not a struggle with an unfriendly interface. Just the chance to write in a text window with a reasonable line length makes an enormous difference. I hope you can keep some sort of support for Blogger.

  3. Daniel Jalkut Says:

    Thanks @Michael and @Roger – I think I will probably end up with some kind of compromise where Blogger is not officially supported as a recommended service, but allowed to be set up, maybe with some warning that it’s not full-featured. Thanks for letting me know it’s important to you to continue using MarsEdit with Blogger even if you can’t upload images.

  4. Ruffin Says:

    Ditto keep Blogger around, please!

    I posted a an idea for a universal workaround over on Michael Tsai’s blog, and figured I should mention it to Punkass too if I actually wanted a chance it appears in MarsEdit (I’ve also been meaning to add it to my Markdown editor for Windows):

    Would you support inline data tags? rsc=”data:image/png;base64,iVBORw…” If you hide that with [Picture 1’s alt text][1] or similar and not have the [1][loooong data string] at the bottom so that the giant source attribute isn’t shown directly while editing, then you can support “uploading” images to any service that doesn’t limit a post’s text length.

    Not quite as trivial a thing to implement elegantly, but a universal, lowest common denominator fix that should work on any platform that doesn’t censor html or length.

    Hope html tags are accepted here. Apologies if not!

  5. Daniel Jalkut Says:

    Hi @Ruffin – I am not sure why the comment took a while to show up, I didn’t have to moderate it or anything.

    I hadn’t considered inline data tags. You’re right, it would work around the problem but I also think they might be kind of obnoxious especially for large photos, because they force the client to read all the data at once before even showing the main page.

  6. Matt Blodgett Says:

    Let me just add my voice to the chorus: Please don’t remove Blogger as a supported service in MarsEdit! We want to use MarsEdit with Blogger even if you can’t directly upload images like you used to.

  7. Daniel Jalkut Says:

    Thanks for the feedback, @Matt Blodgett!

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