Well, ignorance is NOT bliss, and two weeks ago I got the notice that my Picasa Web Albums file was nearly full (and I have been blogging only a few months, not for years like Vee!). So, if you too have been blogging "unawares" here is what I have learned so far (don't laugh even though most of you already know all this).
Blogger keeps all of your uploaded photos on a Picasa Web Album, whether you knew it or not. You get to it by having your gmail account opened and going to picasaweb.google.com. There you will see your photos, and at the bottom of the screen it will tell you how much space you have left (you are allowed 1Mb of free space with your blog). BTW, your photos are not really THERE, they are still wherever you left them, so if you delete them from your original file they will also be deleted from your blog!
I have been doing two things wrong. First of all, I uploaded photos willy-nilly to the blog because I like to look at them on the preview before I decide what I will actually publish: the idea being it is easier to take away photos I don't want than to go back and look for more photos to add. This would have been fine IF I had gone into my Picasa Web Album and DELETED the ones I didn't use, but I never did this because I never even went to my Picasa Web Album at all. So if you are committing this error, get into your Picasa Web Album and delete those unused photos -- they are wasting valuable space -- even though they are not really there (confused yet?).
The second error I made was uploading directly from iPhoto without resizing. I click the photo icon when writing my post, go to "choose files" at the top, and then enter my iPhoto Library and choose the photos I wanted to upload. Easy. BUT when I do this there is no option for resizing the photo, and my photos were uploading often around 4,000 x 3500 (resolution -- is that the right word?). Apparently a good choice for blog/web photo size is around 800 (-- resolution?) and medium quality -- a big, big difference.
I am not opposed to purchasing extra space from picasa, but the price has gone up ($36/year for 25 GB), and I really don't NEED the extra space yet if my photos were a more realistic size. Easy fix, right? I simply need to resize my photos. But HOW TO DO THIS?
I am hoping there are some straightforward answers, but the search for them has been anything but. Pretty much any information prior to summer 2012 is obsolete. Part of the problem is with iPhoto and part is with picasa/blogger. As far as I can find out, you can only resize photos in iPhoto if you are exporting them. That's not so bad, as I do want to export them to my Picasa Web Album, but I cannot find out how to do this. There was a simple plug-in for this that you downloaded from Google, but Google has now done away with this. Now they want you to download Picasa 3.9 for Mac, but I'm not sure I want to do that. That seems unnecessarily complicated.
Picasa could make this whole problem a lot easier if they had a setting that you could choose that would automatically resize your photos. They actually do have this setting -- it's just that they decide when to use it, not you.
So, I have a lot of questions. Googling for information on this issue has not really gotten me anywhere. I think I am going to have to break down and go take an iPhoto class from the apple store, but that's kind of a pain because it's an hour or more away. If you have any answers or corrections, please send them my way. Right now I will be spending less time on blogging and more time on learning how to use my computer, which, even though I do it reluctantly, might not be such a bad thing;) I didn't realize that this fall was going to be back to (computer) school for me!
Funny you should mention this as a few weeks ago I found I couldn't upload any pics as there was "no more storage space available". I was interested in you directly uploading from iPhoto because I've been transferring photos out of iPhoto onto my desktop before uploading to my blog as it didn't seem to work importing them directly which is a pain to do every time. To fix the problem of having reached capacity I've had to buy a Google storage plan which doest cost very much but it's still a nuisance and I'm wondering how long that's going to give me. Going to have to do a bit more investigation clearly. Happy hunting! E x
ReplyDeleteHoly cow! I had no idea about this. Guess I better check it out. Thanks for posting about it. I just blog blissfully along and never think/worry about issues until someone brings them up. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteOh. I see that you have extra challenges that I don't have since you are using your iPhoto. BTW, your photos really are stored at Picasa and you can go back and find them and reuse them! Isn't that fun? You know, for when you are doing the Note Card Party. Should I email you? It may or may not be helpful since our operating systems seem to be quite different.
ReplyDeleteSeems like I've seen some on-line tutorials on stuff like this. Check Youtube, Apple store, or the app store on your Iphone, if you have one. Do you have your photos backed up? That's the most important thing. You never know when a computer will crash. My old one did and I had to pay close to $300 to retrieve all my information. Fortunately they were able to! I just signed up for CrashPlan to back up my info. It was rated the best for what I needed and is very reasonable.
ReplyDeleteHi Angela, I just wanted to thank you for posting about this. I've only been blogging for 2 months and checked my Picasa storage after reading your post -I had already used up 60%! After going back and resizing the photos on my old posts, I'm now down to 10% with a few left to do. So thanks again, you've really helped a newbie. Oh, and this is my first ever comment on a blog!
ReplyDeleteI feel honored to get your first comment! And you have already surpassed me because I'm still working on how to get my pics resized! I wish there was an easy way to figure all this blogging stuff out, instead of so much trial and error. SewManyWays (on my sidebar) does have some good blogging tips, however. You will see that I have been enjoying reading through your blog. If you decide to add a followers button, I would love to become one:)
DeleteThanks for all the lovely comments. I've been shy about going public while I'm getting used to blogging and still not too sure about it. However, followers button has now been added.
Deletepeeking in...
ReplyDeleteHi there,
ReplyDeleteThis just happened to me today and thanks to your brilliant blog post i was able to resize loads of pictures and taa daa!!! free up my space so i can now carry on happily blogging,
Thank you so much xxx
Could you explain how you resized the pictures in Picasa? Or do you mean you resized them in posts? I'm in this situation, too and not sure what to do!
DeleteI am going through this same thing right now! I just tried to upload pictures to my private family blog today and it is full. I have both blogs connected to that email and therefore that Picasa account. I do not know how to resize the pictures on the old posts.
ReplyDeleteI am not sure what to do. Thanks for the post. Glad I'm not the only one with this problem. I am so sad!
Hi Angela
ReplyDeleteReceived the dreaded "exceeded your storage limit" only after blogging from May of this year.
WHAT???!!!
Went ahead and paid for the one month 25G in order to do my blog posts for that week.
Then I sat and did some online research. I found out that my photos in Picasa Web Albums were over sized.
So I have just spent the last week (at various intervals) resizing all my photos in Picasa Web Albums.
Here is how to edit photos already stored in your Picasa Web Albums.
Select Album
Select Photo
Under Actions drop down menu
Select Edit this photo in Creative Kit
Resize the photo (after it loads)
I have been using 420x315
Select Apply
Select Save to my album
Select Replace
The new photo size is then generated , and you move on to the next photo.
A very tedious job, but that's the only way I have found so far.
It freed up my space, and then I cancelled the extra storage space, since I was not using any of my 1gig space after resizing my photos.
I am still working on the resizing issue, so I won't run into this problem again.
I also believe there should be some way that Picasa Web Albums should be able to indicate which photos are being used in your blog, so you can delete all the others.
Virginia, Thanks so much -- this was just the information I needed! I have figured out how to resize my photos in iPhoto and save them to a folder under Pictures in my computer. This article really helped me with that: http://thebigfishbowl.com/?p=29. Now you have given me the missing piece. Again, thanks so much!
DeleteWe've now been given 5gb of space and I'm resizing old pictures as I had this problem last year as well.
ReplyDeleteOnce I found out what was going on I started using MS Office 2010 to resize all future blog pics and have even uploaded albums of post header pictures to use for posts so it's easier to just click on a picture in my album rather than uploading the same pic over and over. That also takes up space.
I'm currently using 795 pixels as 800 was recommended. Make sure to copyright your pictures too if you don't want people using them for their own means. Had to do that after some people decided to use my pics of my designer jewellery on their ebay listing to show off the piece they were selling. Although that didn't stop someone from doing it and they claimed they didn't see the copyright.
Thanks for posting about this - really helpful!
ReplyDeleteI'm working out how to do a blog and this has really helped
Thanks for posting about this - really helpful!
ReplyDeleteI'm working out how to do a blog and this has really helped
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ReplyDeleteI wish there were a way to resize all my photos in picassaweb at once, instead of One. At. A. Time. Oh my -- I have thousands of photos to resize. Boohoo!!! This'll keep me busy for a few months!
ReplyDelete