After hours of research and time asking questions and picking up answers in forums, from what I can gather the "picture" issue is something to do with Google making changes to third-party cookies ........... no, I don't have a clue either,  I just blog!  

Google Chrome and other browsers have begun phasing out third-party cookies in order to better protect user privacy. Starting January 2, 2024, Drive will start serving downloads without requiring third-party cookies that are embedded on third-party websites. This is separate from downloading files from Drive. ???? All gobbledygook to me! 

This means that because I use a third party (?) Open Live Writer to format my posts (because it's a lot easier to work with pictures, adding watermarks, better sizing and position etc.) before transferring to Blogger, Google are no longer giving permission for those pictures to be published (seen) - Error 403!  So I and many, many others are scuppered, loosing years and years of work and 1,000's of pictures.  The only pictures that are still visible on either of my blogs are those uploaded in my pre OLW days and when there's been an occasional problem with said programme. 

So the chances of me ever getting the blogs properly functioning again are almost nil, which is why I (stupidly??) chose to start all over again, because I just couldn't bear to look at either one of them, especially The Monkeys, because let's be honest, it was almost a diary of my life over the past 12 years, with an awful lot of memories happy and sad packed in.  It was a record of how my life (and theirs) has changed unbelievably in that time and it was comforting to look back on certain events now and again...... I mean, who can forget Nigel going to meet the Queen at Buckingham Palace! As for Fiddle Fart, that was a record of just over 3,000 projects, I could always reference on.  So, thank you Google! 

I know I could have just stopped blogging, but I just wasn't quite ready yet, I wanted to give Fiddle Fart another year at least and perhaps the same for The Boyz before retiring properly. 

This past week has been a very steep learning curve and if there's any saving grace, at least I know my brain is still working well enough to set things up all over again!

Such is life, but if it happens again, that's it!