Deleting photos

[gmohr]

I am encountering a very frustrating problem. I posted a number of photos while I still had file sourcing turned on. They can still be found when using Google image search even though I now have file sourcing turned off. The photos I have posted since turning off file sourcing cannot be found using Google image search.

So I tried to delete the earlier photos since they were causing a lot of transfer usage. I deleted the articles but the photos are still in the system, still found and sourced by Google. I can't figure out how to get rid of them. They are in the folder _photos, which I don't know how to access.

[john]

We'd need some more information from you in order to help with this. It would be necessary to know the URLs of the images you are referring to, the approximate date you removed these images from your photo albums, examples of how you see these images being sourced by Google, etc. Since you haven't given us your blog address, it's very hard to dig any deeper into this for you. Please send this information to us via our contact form if you prefer.

FYI, the _photos directory is not visible in your File Manager, it's a system-generated path used when displaying photos from your photo albums.

[gmohr]

Sorry.

Here's my blog
http://www.glenmohr.com

Here's an image found by Google
link

I deleted that image two or three days ago.

At the same time I deleted this one, changed the name of the image and reposted it:
link

It used to be the most popular article on my site until I deleted it. Now see what happens in a google search: link

Notice that the second one is no longer found but the first one is. As far as I know I did the same thing with both.

[john]

When I click on either of these links, I get the same thing, your blog says "ERROR: Article # 241457 not found" in the first case and "ERROR: Article # 241454 not found". So I am not sure what exactly you are seeing as the problem...

Some things to note:

1. Google maintains its own cache of thumbnails which are not deleted when you delete your source file.
   
2. Google does not index your site immediately after you add, edit, or delete content
   
3. While your new posts are often updated within a day, Google does not check every page on the web every day to see if it has changed, so Google's index may show for as long as several months that a page still exists when it has been removed.
   
4. Google's index is updated only every 1-3 months.
   

Keeping in mind those things, let's go back to the beginning and ask that you make sure we have the following information:

• What exactly did you do?
  
• What did you think would happen?
  
• What happened instead?
  

If you're asking us "why when I removed a photo from my blog, does Google still have it in its index?" then the answer is due to #3 and 4 above, Google may not have visited the page to see that it was removed and even if it did it may not have updated its index to reflect that.

[gmohr]

I wanted the pictures on my blog, I just didn't want them to be indexed by google. I have one photo album

http://glenmohr.com/blog/AbigailsDrawings

The photos I put in it before turning off file sourcing show up in Google. The ones I put in it since turning off file sourcing do not show up in Google.

I don't care if the thumbnails for those earlier pictures still show up in Google Images, but when someone tries to click through from Google to my site, I don't want them to find the photo. In order to do this I deleted the photo by editing the photo entry and clicking the delete button. Then I posted the picture again but under a different name.

This worked once. See my earlier post in this thread - the image titled "My Mommy Saying Goodbye to Bobbi" still shows up as a thumbnail in Google but if you click on that thumbnail it tells you the image has been removed from my blog.

I did the same thing with a second image, "Sleeping Beauty." That one shows up as a thumbnail in Google Images but when you click on the thumbnail it still finds the photo on my blog.

So I can't figure out why it worked with one image but not with the other.

[john]

I wanted the pictures on my blog, I just didn't want them to be indexed by google.

If this is the crux of your issue, then you should read Google's own instructions on the topic where they tell you how to Remove an image from Google's Image Search.

[john]

And by the way, I did edit your earlier post where you posted really long URLs which cause this page to be distorted. I see you put the long URLs back. Can you please edit your post so that the long URLs are just linked to by a word so as to restore the readability of this page? Thanks!

[gmohr]

The URLS were still showing up long for me so I was trying to fix them. I've put back the href tags but the HTML is not getting interpreted in my browser.