Picasa Photo Problem

[UPDATE: I have updated the photo links for the most recent and visited posts. Still more to go. Unless you visit a certain range of posts you will not now notice the problem.]

Apparently my interpretation of certain aspects of Picasa's functionality and terminology was disastrously incorrect. Due to this disconnect, a great number of images are now not appearing on my blog. At the moment it appears a major amount of effort and time will be required to resolve this issue. I apologize for the problem.

In the spirit of helping others to avoid my mistake (and possibly getting a quick genius solution from someone), I will briefly share what I can piece together. The album containing photos for this blog was listed as "Limited, anyone with the link".  In short, I did not want people to be able to view all of my blog's photos at once in a single glance on Picasa. Some reasons for this include that I sometimes want/need to keep photos private until a post is ready for publishing and I want to encourage people to view photos through the blog where more context is provided.  My understanding was that the "Limited" setting enabled me to embed the necessary links to photos on my blog for readers to view individually, but without a special link the album would not be viewable as a whole. For a time this all seemed to be true.

But recently I noticed curious numbers in Picasa that suggested people might be able to view the album despite me having no awareness of ever sending the album link to anyone. A friend of mine checked this out and indeed she was able to "follow" my Picasa account and see the "limited" albums, despite them being clearly marked (to me) as limited. She did not have the link though. This baffled me.

On the limited album's page in my account I discovered a "Reset secret link" option. I figured resetting it might resolve the issue I was experiencing. After clicking it I received this warning:

Are you sure you want to reset the secret link to this album? This will remove access for everyone who has the current secret link.

Since I had no awareness of sending the "secret link to this album" and had no awareness of using it myself I had no worries. I was not worried about the individual photos since my understanding was that they each had their own secret link. This belief was supported by the fact that when I embed the images in my blog Picasa provides an option to "Hide album link" which I always chose. I only embedded the individual photo's link.

Needless to say, after reseting the album link it appears all the embedded links for images in my blog from that folder are now nonfunctional. That certainly was not my expectation.

*sigh*

Again, if any readers know of any quick solutions I would appreciate it. You can email me -- isidorsfugue at gmail. Otherwise, I will likely need to replace over 400 photos one by one. Again, that will take some time.

Fortunately, I have a post that will likely serve as useful for when I complete this task. More on that later.