This tip is primarily for those using Google's blogger, but can be a handy thing to consider for others.
I've been coming across some bloggers lately that have suddenly found that they can't load up more photos! This is because they have come up against the limit of free space on Picasa. The limit stands at 1GB. Which you can think ought to be enough, but if you load up lots of photos without any resize, you will hit the limit fairly quickly. And in this day when people go around with phones and want to be able to upload as they go without any image manipulation, the space will quickly be used.
That's by design though. They want you to buy from them. It costs about $30/yr for 25G. It's a fair price compared to the other offerings out there, but it does cost.
The big photos on blogs are pretty for sure, but they take space, and not to mention bandwidth to download. But if you don't want to lay out money for your blogging, then you have to consider cropping, resizing and reducing the picture quality. It takes time to do these things, I can assure you, but if avoiding paying is your goal, it's worth the effort
Another small tip is if you use the same photos across several blogs, then you can go in and pull up the same photo from your albums without uploading it again.
There are alternatives to using up your blog space though. You can use Flickr to load up pics and then use their interface for adding them to your blog. Think though that if you don't pay for Flickr either, you will only see 200 pics at a time, and you may have difficulty deleting some of them. Plus your monthly upload is capped at 100 MB, so again, if you upload large photos, you will hit the cap fast.
Wordpress offers 3GB of free storage if you run your blog on wordpress.com. Remember though that this will include everything you load up, not just photos. The text doesn't take too much space, but it will add up. The database storage might be included in the 3GB (read the fine print on this), and that definitely uses up some space.
If you are on blogger and want to figure out how to check how much space you have, go to your account overview, then click on Products, then on Picasa Web Albums. There at the bottom in tiny type, you can see how much of your allowance you are using.
If you are willing to pay for your blogging, which most serious bloggers end up doing in one form or another, then you have a wide variety of options to choose from. Take some time to make sure to find the one that suits you best!
8 comments:
Very sound advice, Emily! I feel exactly the same about large photo files and have always cropped/resized mine to fit. I use the 3 mega-pixel setting on my camera, then, after cropping the picture to get rid of any excess background and rough edges, I usually resize to about 40%.
Another good reason not to use large photos is the length of time it can take your blog to fully download onto the reader's computer!
Thanks for the tip on finding out how much Picasa space one has left. I see I have 93.03% of my space left to use. So, re-sizing works! I also re-use old photos when I need to repost them and make sure to delete any duplicates that crop up if, say, I've had to reload a picture for some reason. I get rid of the unused one.=)
Good posting, Em!=)
Any idea how to post to Blogger from Flickr without it showing the photo title? I was using Picasa but there's an Android bug that means I can't upload pics from my tablet that I didn't actually take with my tablet camera. And the iPhone Blogger app just uploads giant pictures :(
Thanks for the info! I was just searching for info on how to tell how much storage I have used. THanks so much for posting.
I have been blogging for ten years on blogger and I have yet to reach my limit. Of course, early on there were no pictures, but I've still had pictures for about eight years and I'm only using 33%. Let's hope people take your advice!
Thank you Emily. I just reached my photo limit and it's been so frustrating. I don't know how to resize photos on my computer. Do you know how I could do this? I don't have photoshop.... maybe I should get it.
Hi Amy,
You can download GIMP and use it. It's free. There is some simple photo program with windows, but you can only do a percent resize, no cropping or by the actual pixels you want.
If you right click on the photo, you will see a menu, and pick Open with Paint. there under picture, is a choice to do a resize, but as I said, it's only by percent, so you will have to practice a little to get a size you like.
Mad, I don't know the answer. I'm going to have to look at that. I have only used posting through Flickr a few times. If I find out something useful, I will leave another comment or make another blogging tips post about the photos.
Just checked. I'm only using 0.02 GB (1.71%) for 600+ photos! I always crop and re-size photos so I guess that's why.
Thanks for the post --- very informative. I definitely hope you keep blogging!
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