Sunday, April 08, 2007

Blogger/Picasa Image Space Reporting!

Limit? What Limit!

Some time back (when I was figuring out Blogger) I pondered how a Blogger user could determine how much space we had used toward our quota limit.

At the time of that post (July 2006) there wasn't an easy way to tell (short of hitting it) how close we were to reaching the (then) 300MB total.

While I have included images in my posts sparsely, I don't want to run into the limit un-aware.

A Major Storage Upgrade

The not-so-recent news that Google/Blogger acquired Picasa and is now using that service to host its Blogger images (if desired) was welcome news.

Master Blogger guru phydeaux3 posted some neat perks that came with the merge: phydeaux3: More Blogger Photo Integration with Picasa

These included a blog photo album collection of your Blogger image uploads, and an image space upgrade from 250-300MB to 1GB (and counting!).

What's even better is that if for some reason you hit your 1GB limit, you can buy more!

Not bad, despite the image url quirks under this arrangement that are pointed out in phydeaux3's post.

But how do you tell progress towards your size limit?

Storage Reporting Solution #1

According to this Blogger Help link: How can I get more storage for my images? there is a link to a Picasa help page: How do I know how much storage I'm using?

The solution? Log into your Picasa Web Albums (using your Blogger login) and make sure you are on the My Photos page. At the very bottom your current storage information will show in green.

Yep. I did and there it was!

You are currently using 1 MB (1%) of your 1024 MB

Whew! Lots of room to grow!

It Gets Even Easier!

But then, this post was actually inspired by something else I noticed first.

I had barely noticed on Saturday's post, when adding my E7 image, that at the very bottom of the Blogger image posting pop-up window was a tiny line that notified me exactly how much space I was using of my Blogger/Picasa quota:

While it is possible I had missed this before, when I last posted an image to the blog, I think it is a fairly recent addition to the image adding interface.

Nice! On-posting storage reporting!

Me likey!

Bonus Tip...Cleaning House

While I was over in my Picasa Web Album page, I got looking at my Blogger images posted.

Images posted prior to December 2006 to Blogger before the Google/Picasa merger haven't been moved over yet, so they aren't showing. But Blogger says they are working on those as well.

I also noticed that there were some "draft" images I had originally posted to the blog, but ended up removing and replaced with a different image.

Before, I knew they were there, but not visible and no way to remove from my quota. Now with Picasa, I can go in and remove them!

Nice! No more "error image posts" to worry about taking up space.

Additional Links:

Blogger Help : Picture Posting FAQ

Tips for Using Images in Blogs

Happy Blogger image posting and watching!

--Claus

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