Tuesday, August 18, 2020

Google Lemonade: Photo insertion bug workaround?, no photo cache and Edit Icons

 The photo insertion bug is that sometimes a photo gets added at the end of a post instead of where I placed the cursor. Now that I'm forcing myself to use (suffer) the new version, I'm beginning to see a pattern. (One reason for using the new version is that the new search function is much better. It is a much needed improvement since the author's keyword search function quit working for me on April 3, 2018. When you have thousands of posts, finding a particular one can be a challenge when you can only use the labels that are on the posts.)

(BTW, I didn't work around the August double-space (putting <p> around everything) bug for this post so this is also an experiment in formatting.)

First of all, if you hit the "photos at the end" bug while adding multiple photos, the photos end up in reverse order.

The pattern is that the problem seems to happen if I'm trying to add photos after an existing photo. In my case, the existing photo probably has a caption. And I probably have added a blank line after the existing photo. But if I add it after text, I stand a better chance that things will work. So now I add a blank line and the text "zzz" before inserting the photo.  And then, of course, I have to remember to delete the "zzz".

In fact, if I forget the "zzz", I can remove the photos from their wrong location with a ctrl-Z, add the "zzz" and then add the photos again and they will go in the right place. (Update: this zzz trick worked a few times this morning when I typed this post. This evening I've seen it fail a few times. But if I do a zzz line followed by a blank line with the cursor followed by a yyy line, it worked a few times.)

And I'm reminded about one of the first the-new-is-worse-than-the-old issues I reported: the "Add caption" text is not highlighted. I now have to scroll to the text and triple click it before typing. In the old version I could just start typing and it would auto-scroll me down to the caption. That may seem like a petty complaint, but when you are adding a caption to several photos, it more than doubles the amount of time it takes me to add the captions. And I'm a fast mouser with a scroll wheel. I've been using a mouse since Apple introduced the Mac. We had a Mac at work for doing viewgraphs.

A more significant "Add caption" issue is that when I add a caption to an even photo, the blank line after the previous odd photo disappears. I have discovered that I can work around this bug by added the captions from the bottom photo up. 

I'm happy to note that the "auto sizing" of photos that they introduced in August is, most of the time, an improvement.

Having to add the photos twice because the first add goes in the wrong place made me notice that they have removed the photo cache. After their initial photo insertion software was an incredible performance disaster, they changed back to the old software, but without the photo caching feature. The photo caching feature allowed you to do something else (e.g. go to the bathroom) while photos were being uploaded. It would keep those photos around for several hours so that you could then quickly add photos by selecting them out of the cache. The new version does not have that feature. When I first noticed that, I went back to the legacy version and discovered that the cache support in the old version had been removed!!!! My upload bandwidth is usually around 25mbs so waiting for the upload every time that I want to add photos is not a real big deal for me. But I do pity those with a slower upload that used the old "batch upload" feature that has now disappeared. Below is a screenshot of their improvements for the Editor. I find it telling that they are still claiming an "improved image/video upload experience." First of all, even if I ignore the performance issue of the original software, the intended software design was not better than the old. And now we not only have the old software, we have old software that has been made worse.

Google

The table support is not a big deal for me because I have added them using the HTML mode. But I'm reminded that the HTML in the new version is not readable because the editor does not add new lines. The legacy version did a good job of making the HTML readable. It just occurred to me to look for the "table support." None of the edit icons struck me as a table. So I ran the mouse over all 26 icons to read the pop-up text. I now understand the better transliteration claim because they added right-to-left and "Input Tools" for many different languages. (BTW, yesterday I still noticed a performance issue entering text in big posts. I have to look away from the screen while typing because the characters won't appear until seconds later.) But I didn't find anything for adding tables. I'm going to have to find a millennial to teach me how to access the table support.


I changed the background so that the boundaries of the screenshots below are more visible.

(I noticed that a colored background also makes the unwanted blank lines inserted by the August bug more visible.)

Speaking of edit icons, this is what the new version looks like:

And this is what the legacy version looks like:


Actually, the above screenshot exposes a problem with the legacy version, I lost the edit icons because I resized the window. After closing and reopening, I have:


Both screenshots include the top of the page because that gives me a legacy screenshot to discuss another lemon after Doomsday. Today's lemon is that the three icons I use, Link Insertion, Photo Insertion, and Remove Formatting are not displayed in the new version. I have to click the "..." icon and shove the mouse around some more. Now that I'm doing an A/B comparison, I see that one reason that "my icons" fit on the page in the legacy version is that they were smaller.

I have discovered that I can get "my icons" to appear if I widen the window and then narrow the window and then shove the icon scrollbar to the right.


The removal of the cache feature reminds me that Google owns YouTube as well. When they did a new version a couple of years ago, they removed the vibration reduction feature. I used that heavily because it did a good job of taking the "shakes" out of a video. And then I discovered they removed that feature from the legacy YouTube software! So I looked for a video editor that had VR. But the one I bought made me really appreciate YouTube's algorithm. When I used the VR feature in my editor, it produced a video that made me seasick. So now I have a Nikon lens that has VR.     So making the legacy version worse so that the new version is not worse than the legacy version has a precedent. 




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