The Future of Blogger and MarsEdit

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.