October 16, 2012

Reaching Picasa's Photo Storage Limit

I've finally reached Picasa's photo storage limit. I knew the day would come because the amount of content I have on Multiply far and away exceeds Picasa's basic limit of 1 gig, but I thought I'd bump up against the limit and see what they say so I could tell everyone moving their stuff to Google products about it. Here's the message I just received as I was transferring an album of photos from Multiply to PIcasa (Google's photo product):

Whoops! You're out of space. You are currently using 100% of your 1 GB quota for photos. Upgrade storage

Photos are stored in your Picasa Web Albums account and are included in your 1 GB free quota for photos. Additional storage you purchase is shared between several Google products and is in addition to your free quota. Learn more

I had already decided that I would upgrade once I hit the limit. I checked out prices previously and they're comparable to what I've already been paying here in Multiplyland. Do I clicked on the "Upgrade storage" link. The first thing that greeted me was a review of the upgrade options. I had forgotten that Picasa's storage limit is lower than the other products'. Here's the Free plan:

Free

5 GB of Drive (0% used)
10 GB of Gmail (21% used)
1 GB of Picasa (99% used)


So, essentially, because I'd reached 100% (or nearly) in one of those areas, I have to upgrade to add more data to that area. I assume I could keep adding in the other areas without upgrading. But I want to transfer my photos, so I look through the rest of the options.

25 GB

$2.49 / Month

25 GB for Drive and Picasa

Bonus: Your Gmail storage will be upgraded to  25 GB.

There's also a 100 gig option for $5/month. But I don't think I'll need that much space. So I opt for the 25 gig option. It looks like you can't pay on a yearly basis. So I'll be paying $2.49 a month until I cancel. Here's the note on the site: "You will be automatically charged $2.49 USD every month starting October 16, 2012 until you cancel your subscription."

Checkout is done through Google Wallet, which is yet another Google product. I'd signed up for it earlier (in order to buy some Lego's for the Old Firehouse that I was making) so it defaulted directly to that. I don't know if you'd be given other options if you haven't already added this service. Feel free to add that info to the comments if you find out the answer on that one. 

Now that I've purchased my storage, it shows me what my current plan is, it shows the next plan up, which I'd seen before, which is 100 gig. And then it shows a plan I hadn't seen before (for 200 gig) and it shows one more option which apparently goes up into several Terabytes. Yowza! 

I was able to start uploading photos to my Picasa storage again right away. There was no lag time. I haven't received an email update on my purchase yet, though. Hmmm, I even refreshed a couple of times and checked my spam folder. So all in all I'd say that the process was pretty painless, pretty cheap, but I'm a little dismayed that an alert email wasn't sent right away to confirm my purchase (even though I know it went through since I have photos uploading right now.) I also don't know what happens if I don't pay up some month. Do I lose all my content? Some? How do they decide what would stay and what I'd lose? I'll be on the alert for answers to these questions. 
Posted by barefootmeg at
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4 comments:

  1. Meg DunnOctober 16, 2012 at 2:17 PM

    I've mostly been uploading photos to Picasa and then linking them quickly over to the blog post that goes with them on Blogger (from the export tool here on Multiply). So I haven't been moving descriptions, just uploading photos and putting a title on them that matches the post they came from. But just now I thought, "Why redo each post? If I have the pics here, I could just add the description and be done with it." So I tried that and got this message, "Album descriptions must be 1000 characters or less. You are currently using 1192 characters. Please make your description shorter and try again."

    So, I'll probably (especially for my larger albums) just put a link in my Blogger post back to my PIcasa album rather than add all the photos to the post. It's not had to add them (it's very easy, in fact.) but it's just not the best layout for an album and Picasa works better for that. Ideally, in the future, I'll just plop my photos into Picasa and then share them on Google+. That would be the ultimate in easy for people to look through.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Meg DunnOctober 16, 2012 at 2:24 PM

    Hmmm, I just realized that I can also embed the album from Picasa into Blogger as a slideshow. That's pretty darn easy, too. And as long as I'm adding a link, I might as well make it an embed code with a slideshow kind of link.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sue ZOctober 16, 2012 at 10:11 PM

    So you can also put photos into blogspot.
    What size are the slid shows?
    Sounds cheap enough.
    I already have a photobucket account. I put the URL
    In on all of my posts. Pictures Inchange the size and resolution to 72 dpi.
    I think if I import my multiply pictures to blogspot the links will be broken and there
    Will be no pictures? Haven't tried yet?

    Thanks Meg

    ReplyDelete
  4. Meg DunnOctober 17, 2012 at 8:46 AM

    You can add photos or video to any blogger/blogspot post.

    You can set the slideshows to various sizes. 288px across, 400px across, 600px across or 800 px across.

    If you import your site to blogspot using the export .xml feature, then yes, all of the photos and video are lost, although there are temporary place holders that show up like photos until December 1. So the easiest way that I've found (though it's still tedious) is to download your entire album using the download method on Multiply (on the album, through the slideshow) then upload those photos to Picasa. From there you can easily post the slideshow to the post in Blogger.

    ReplyDelete

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