Mark Twain

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Saturday, June 16, 2012

Paying for Piscasa Memory

How much do you know about Piscasa Web Album
 - the storage used by Blogger to house your blog pictures?
I know very little ... and I kind of liked it that way ... 
until recently!

In the last week or so another blogger commented that she could not find her percentage of Piscasa storage used by going through the new editor interface on Blogger.  She could only find the percentage by using the old editor (which is going away soon.)

hmm...

It got me thinking about how much Piscasa storage I had used up.  Better check now while I still have access to the old editor.

As you can see below, I have used up 78% of my free Piscasa storage in about 2 years.  Yikes!!!

Your current plan:

Free
5 GB of Drive (0% used)
10 GB of Gmail (1% used)
1 GB of Picasa (78% used)

Upgrade:

25 GB
$2.49 / Month
+25 GB for Drive and Picasa
Bonus: Your Gmail storage will be upgraded to 25 GB.
Choose this plan
100 GB
$4.99 / Month
+100 GB for Drive and Picasa
Bonus: Your Gmail storage will be upgraded to 25 GB.
Choose this plan























Now I am not totally oblivious to the limits of "free." Another blogging friend, Happy One at the Life is Good Blog, ran out of memory recently.  I remember that she was offered a plan that cost $5.00 for a year.

I looked for that plan, and I found it - listed as the "old" pricing.   The "new" pricing is as shown.

If my math is correct, the charge for more memory has gone from $5 a year to $30 a year. That is a pretty large jump in cost.


So ...

  • I guess this memory storage thingy on Blogger is the only game in town.  
  • I guess when your storage runs out you have no choice but to buy more or you can stop posting pictures. :-(


At first I was upset, but after I thought it out, I decided that $30 a year wouldn't break me, and it is a small price to pay for the enjoyment I get out blogging.

But a number of questions come to mind.  I would really like to hear from you.
  • Do you know how much free space you have on Piscasa?
  • How can you find the percentage of expended Piscasa storage using the new editor - which will soon be the only editor?
  • Are you already paying for memory space?  Are you paying the new rate or were you lucky enough to get the cheaper one?
  • When you ran out of free Piscasa how did you know? 
  • Is there a "work around" to using Piscasa and avoiding this whole thing? 
  • What happens if in 3 years you decide not to pay ... do your currently stored pictures disappear from your blog? 
  • Is there another Piscasa option that provides less memory?  It took me 2 years to use up 1 GB.  The new plan provides 25 GB.  I don't need that much memory.
Questions, questions, questions ....


7 comments:

Lynne said...

Yes . . . and if they know this much information regarding our FREE usage, how much other FREE information is floating around about each/every one of us. AND, there must be how many bloggers in the world, MILLIONS, AND, using many, many photos. Has everyone had to upgrade, OR just some . . . Those who advertise . . . ?

Questions, questions, questions . . . AND who do we ask for answers?

Anonymous said...

I started paying for storage last year and have been getting reminders that it is time to renew. I like Picassa. It has lots of interesting features. Now I have to try to figure out how to access my account to see how much room I have left.

Anita said...

I'm so "laid back" and uninformed, I had no idea there was a limit. I don't think it will affect me; as you can see, I don't post many pictures.
After all, see the title of this blog? and uploading a picture on dial-up takes around 15 minutes.
(but yes, I do enjoy seeing other folks' pix)

Terra said...

I knew nothing about this until reading your post, so thank you. Can we delete some older posts to create more room for new posts and photos? 30 dollars a year is 300 over 10 years, not a negligible amount. Stuff I will think about.

happyone said...

I used up my free space a while ago and now pay $5 a year. I've used up 9% of the amount I can use until I have to pay more.
I just go to Piscasa and right on the front page it tells me how much storage I've used up.

happyone said...

One more thing. Once you use up your space it does NOT delete the pictures you have up, you just won't be able to upload any more on Blogger.

Carolyn said...

Wow, the things I do not know!
I read your post. I could not answer any of the questions. (But on the one where you decide to no longer pay Picasa: I thought that pictures that had already been posted would not be deleted. I was pretty sure of that, just because there are so many "hibernating" blogs that do not have the pictures hacked out of them.)
The previous comments by Happyone confirmed my thoughts. I guess that we all learn as we go. Thanks for making me aware of this issue!