Unlimited Photo Storage with PicasaWeb

Unlimited Photo Storage with PicasaWeb

Picasa Web Albums offers 1 GB of free storage for photos and videos. However, files under certain size limits don’t count towards this free storage limit. This is crucial. Photos up to 2048 x 2048 pixels and videos up to 15 minutes won’t count towards your free storage and uploads to Picasa Web would be automatically resized to the dimensions. You would need a Google+ account on the same ID to activate this. The free storage sizes are good for sharing photos on the web and for archival, and allows for up to 4R prints. All photos uploaded from the Picasa software or in Picasa Web Albums over the free size limit will count towards your 1 GB of free storage.

It comes in handy in events when your hard drive crashes and there goes all your photo collection. I do not have a habit of backing up my data to a external HDD. Anyway, the chances of the backup failing is actually not that low too. I prefer to trust my backup with one of the biggest technology leader today, Google. I used to use Skydrive for my backup purposes as it offers a whopping 25gb, but I have since started to migrate over to Picasa Web to combine all my data under the Google cloud. As I was going through my collection, I encountered a “Error: Longterm bandwidth exceeded”. This was approximately after 2000 to 3000 photos that had been uploaded and Google has a cap on the monthly bandwidth per account. The exact limit is still unknown but I had to wait for a month before I stopped receiving the error message.

Other handy things about Picasa Web and Google+ is well, photo tagging. This very Facebook-like feature lets anyone in your extended network in Google+ tag people in your public photos. The person tagged is given the option to view the album and share it. If you’ve been tagged by someone in your Circles, the tag is automatically approved. You can remove tags on the photos homepage in Google+ or the Photos tab on your Google Profile. And if you would rather have more control, you can adjust this setting to enable manual approval of tags. If you were already using tagging in Picasa previously, all existing name tags in Picasa remain when you join Google+.

In Summary:

Google Picasa Webs

  • Photo Resolution: Max 2048 x 2048
  • Photo Qty: Unlimited
  • Qty per album: 1000
  • Video: 15 min
  • Privacy: Controlled (Linked to Google+, can be fully private)
  • Face Tagging: Yes

Other options are:

Facebook

  • Photo Resolution: Max 2048 x 2048
  • Photo Qty: Unlimited
  • Qty per album: 200
  • Video: 20 min
  • Privacy: (Linked to Facebook, can be fully private)
  • Face Tagging: Yes

Flickr

  • Photo Resolution: Unlimited
  • Photo Qty: 300mb per month
  • Qty per album: Unlimited
  • Video: 2 videos per month
  • Privacy: Controlled
  • Face Tagging: No

Microsoft Skydrive

  • Photo Resolution: Unlimited
  • Photo Qty: Capped at 25gb
  • Qty per album: Unlimited
  • Video: Capped at 2gb
  • Privacy: Controlled
  • Face Tagging: No

 

3 Replies to “Unlimited Photo Storage with PicasaWeb”

  1. iCloud unique feature is Photostream which synchronises 1000 of your latest photos to your iOS devices all the time. So if you take a photo on your iPhone, it will appear on your iPad and on your Macbook. However, it doesn’t really backup all your photos. The photos you upload to Photo Stream are stored in iCloud for 30 days to give your devices plenty of time to connect and download them. The archival is still on your Mac or iOS device.

    You can still use iCloud as a form of cloud storage but the limit is only 5gb and I still feel picasa wins :)

  2. BTW, not sure why your name tag sync don’t work but perhaps you can tried this. I just verified it working this morning.

    Picasa Photo-tagging: Go to options, Name Tags -> Store Name Tags in photos and Google+ Photos -> Enable Name Tags

    During the option to upload photo, the sharing option would appear. If you remove your friends from the sharing list, the name tags of these friends would not appear in Google+ but would still remain in your PicasaWeb Album where it would remain private only to you. Let me know how it goes!