Fifty Plus (50+) - OT: Question for you bloggers

I have a bike blog at Wordpress.com. This week, whenever and wherever I view it, the pictures appear pixelated (except for the one in the header which I uploaded from our hard drive). All the photos are stored at Shutterfly and I insert a link to the photo on the blog.

Does anyone know why this happens? Is this an inherent problem with linking back to this, or any, photo site?

I'd prefer to upload pics straight from my computer as it saves having to first upload all the pics to a host, then link to them on the blog. And, if the hosting site goes away...... :eek:

Anyone have a clue?

It looks like all the photo file information is not be transferred to the blog. Maybe Shutterfly is doing some maintenance on their servers and has to limit their bandwidth temporarily

Try uploading a fresh copy of one of the pictures, or a new picture to Shutterfly and see how it appears in your blog.

Yen,

I see what you mean. Cone Wrench had a great suggestion. You may also want to try Photo Bucket and see if it is the blog or Shutterfly.

Your photos links are to very low resolution images. Perhaps you are linking to the thumbnails rather than the higher resolution images?
I don't do Shutterfly. Do they allow linking? If not, this may be their way of telling you "Don't do this"
Note that they are also very distorted.
If Shutterfly doesn't work out try Flickr

2,767 bytes - you can't get resolution with that!

I think thumbnails are linking (as suggested above) or they do something nasty to your pics.

Try another host, or set up your own web page and link there (this is what I do)

Yeah...you've linked to a thumbnail and then expanded it. Here's what one of your pictures looks like displayed naturally:

http://im1.shutterfly.com/procserv/47b8db29b3127ccea8194cedc42900000026108Eas2TVu4c-

Image Shack works well for me. I just use it as a place to store photos for linking.

http://my.imageshack.us/

But check to see if you can link to the real picture in Shutterfly. I'm not familiar with it.

Thanks everyone. The pictures looked fine until last weekend so I know some of them weren't just thumbnails. Then, they all gradually took on the pixelated look during this week. I've copied/pasted the full-size photo url and I'll see how that works.

I've also discovered that Wordpress does allow photo uploads from the computer... I thought they didn't, perhaps that is new. I have lots to learn about it and little time to do it.:twitchy:

Don't know if you use Photoshop or another image editing program, Yen, but I always select "Save for Web" if I will be using a picture on my blog. That optimizes the picture (much smaller file size) so it will display in full, but load quickly. And I upload them from my computer.

Thanks. I just read the recommendation at Wordpress.com to upload optimized photos so I will work on that this weekend when I have a bit more time. I have Picasa, and Irvanview apparently does it as well. I also have Photoshop (a free gift from a former distributor) but I'm the newbiest beginner ever with that...:twitchy:

Thanks. I just read the recommendation at Wordpress.com to upload optimized photos so I will work on that this weekend when I have a bit more time. I have Picasa, and Irvanview apparently does it as well. I also have Photoshop (a free gift from a former distributor) but I'm the newbiest beginner ever with that...:twitchy:

I load 'em from the puter. I use wordpress.