Where does Blogger store pictures?

They say that a picture tells a thousand words.  Imagine my dismay, then, when I noticed that all of the pictures from my recent blog posts (all the ones I had created since switching to Blogger, actually) had vanished.  Thousands and thousands of my bons mots lost to the Internet.  Not since the burning of the library in Alexandria has such a misfortune been visited upon the store of human knowledge.

Thankfully, I had copies of most of the missing pictures and they have been restored to their rightful place, but I'm still not completely sure what happened. It turns out that photos you upload directly to Blogspot are actually stored in Google Plus (used to be on Picasa).  It is possible that I did a bit of a clear-out of my Google Plus photos at some point and accidentally deleted them.  I don't remember doing it, but its the kind of thing I would do.

Anyway, this blog post is part warning, part experiment.  Here is a pretty picture:-

It is one of the first pictures I took with my Nikon D50 when I got it almost 10 years ago. Its a fantastic camera and is still my weapon of choice when I need the best possible image quality. It still beats the socks off any other camera I have for image quality and speed (but not portability!).

However, none of that is of any interest to you, the reader.  What is interesting is that I am going to go looking to see where in Google's universe it winds up.  I am also shortly going to delete the picture in Google+ to see what happens.  I'll update this post with my findings.

UPDATE 13/Jan/2015: OK...I have just deleted the picture using the "Photos" app on my Android phone.  So far, no ill-effects on this blog entry, but lets see what happens

UPDATE #2: It didn't happen straight away, but a little while (perhaps an hour) after I deleted the photo from my phone, it also disappeared from the blog. Im rather proud of the photo, so here's another copy of it.