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February 25, 2011

Store More Photos and Videos in Picasa Web Albums

You've probably noticed that Picasa Web's storage counter shows that you have more free space than a couple of days ago. It turns out that this is not a bug.

"We recently made a change whereby any pictures 800 pixels and under don't count towards used PWA storage. The new GB numbers you're seeing are the result of quota recalculations that were made," informs a Google employee.

The new feature encourages users to upload smaller images. If you use Picasa to upload your photos, there's a setting that lets you pick the dimensions of the photos that are uploaded. The "small" option is recommended "for publishing images on blogs and webpages". Blogger users who resize their photos before uploading them will no longer have to buy extra storage if they're prolific.

Another important change is that "all videos under 15 minutes also don't count towards used PWA storage". That means you can now upload short videos to Picasa Web Albums without worrying about the file size.

Update: "Photos less than 800 pixels x 800 pixels and video less than 15 minutes long that are uploaded to Picasa Web Album, Blogger, or Buzz don't count towards your storage quota." (Picasa Web's help center)

17 comments:

  1. Hi,

    I welcome this step of Google. But they should increase at least 1024x image instead of 800x.

    By the way, a little is better than nothing!

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  2. The 800px thing is going to make sure the service really takes off (especially among web denizens with tons of macros and such), but I'm much more interested in the video thing. This makes the video hosting feature much much much better!

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  3. 1024 px would have been a much bolder statement

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  4. The Image feature will attract twitter-er like users to save image on Picasa and tweet a link.

    Video feature is awesome.

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  5. This is an improvement foe videos, don't get me wrong, but with still a 20MB limit there aren't that many videos that can be uploaded.

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  6. 800 px is rather useless these days. I believe 1024 px is about the smallest size that is still worth uploading to Picasa.

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  7. @Anonymous:

    You can upload videos up to 1 GB in size to Picasa Web Albums. (source)

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  8. Perhaps a stupid question. Is an 800 pixel photo 800 pixels wide?

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  9. Now, can they offer a feature to convert my albums to 800 pixel?
    or do I have to re-select photos and re-upload?

    I agree, 1024 would've been nice than 800

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  10. @Don Spark:

    Yes, that's the usual interpretation.

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  11. So is a 100 x 801 photo over or under "800 pixels"?

    What about an 801 x 100 photo? Over or under?

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  12. @David, 99% sure both would be "over."

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  13. Thats why I pay for Flickr, unlimited for $25/yr.

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  14. mi piace assai la possibilità di Upload direttamente i video È possibile caricare video fino a 1 GB per Picasa-

    http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55661

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  15. Very good job, i like the change and improve. Greetings.

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  16. for me 800 pixels is still okay for blog publishing... i usually use it on my blog and my reader had no problem with it ... so this size is still consider great..

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  17. 1024 px would have been a much bolder..would love to have it..

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