Quick Photo Loading and Storage Tips

Over the past few months, I've received emails from fellow bloggers stating they have run out of photo space on blogger and are being asked to purchase more space.  I immediately know they have not resized their images prior to posting them on Blogger.  After a recent post from D7ana, who lost quite a few images when Webshots closed down, I thought this would be a good time to share how I manage my photos.  I am no expert, but maybe something in this post will be useful.

First and foremost, I checked Google Help to understand how they handle their photos.  Blogger is a Google product and pictures loaded into Blogger follow their guidelines.  I copied the UPLOAD YOUR PHOTOS section and posted it at the end of this post.  Bottom line, we get 5GB of free photo storage.  If you load your pictures directly from your phone or your camera, without some resizing, you are going to use up your storage pretty quickly.  I've been on Blogger several years, and I've loaded hundreds of pictures.  I have only used 2% of my 5GB.  How?  I always resize my images.  Before I go into the actual resizing, let me describe how I use and store my photos.

In my lifetime, I've crashed two computers.  That was more than enough.  It is devastating to lose information you thought would always be there.  Now I try to protect my information as much as possible.  When it comes to my pictures, I have several places they are stored.  First of all, I keep most of my pictures on the camera memory cards.  With my point and shoot camera, that is very easy.  Those memory cards are so cheap.  Once I fill one up, I buy another one, and store the used one.  This way I have the original pictures in their original size.  The memory cards are more expensive for my DSLR camera, but, I'm looking into a solution that will allow me to do the same thing.  Moving on.  All of my pictures get resized and are saved on my computer in their appropriate folders.  Since the pictures are resized, my computer performance is not compromised.  The third place, most of my resized photos are stored is on the Cloud.  This may seem like overkill, but I have a great example of how this method came in handy.  When FDQ decided to do the article on VansDollsTreasures, they needed larger images of some pictures I had taken a year earlier.  Thank goodness I still had them on my camera card!

RESIZING
Most of my images, before resizing, have pixel dimensions of 4032x3024.  That is great for producing large poster sized images, but not necessary for viewing on a computer monitor.  Initially, I resized my images to 800x600.  Lately, I've been resizing to 900x750.  According to Google, you can get unlimited standard images, which is 1024x768.  (Please note, these numbers will not be exact.  I select the number for the longer side and the computer selects it for the shorter side).  Since I store them on my computer and do videos, I've opted for less than 1024.  I may start resizing to 1024x768 in the future.  Large images in the videos can make them run very slow.

PROGRAMS TO RESIZE
Whatever digital imaging program you use to adjust your images, should also have a resizing function.  I use a program called Microsoft Digital Imaging Pro.  I bought it more than 10 years ago and have continued using it.  It's not free and not cheap.  The Cadillac of digital imaging programs is Photoshop.  Of course, it's not the easiest thing to learn and it's not cheap, either.  I used to recommend Picnik, but they closed in April of 2012.  GIMP (www.gimp.com) is a FREE online program, but it's not as easy to navigate as Picnik was.  It's a nice program and worth taking a look.  Last year I found a great FREE online program that functions very similarly to Photoshop.  It is a Photo Editor Online by Pixlr.com and can be found at http://pixlr.com/editor/.  I have not had a chance to really explore this program like I've wanted, but it seems quite promising.  If anyone has any other suggestions, please leave them in the comment section below.  By the way, in Blogger you are given the option to show your images as small, medium, large, or original size.  This is not considered resizing.  Resizing needs to take place prior to uploading them to Blogger.

Hope this helps a little.  Below is the information I copied from Google on uploading your photos.

Upload your photos

About Full size photo uploads

If you have turned on Instant Upload on your Android device, photos you take are stored at full size. All photos uploaded are stored privately in the cloud, which means you can access them and share them at any time. You'll be able to upload and store full size photos and videos up to 5GB. When you're beginning to run low on storage, you'll see a notification in your notification tray. If you run out of Google Drive storage quota we'll automatically switch to storing photos at standard size. You can purchase more storage space, if needed.
You can also switch to standard size uploads at any time. Standard size images will not count against the 5GB quota. See definitions below to better understand how the 5GB limit is determined.

Upload size options

• Full size photos refers to the original image resolution of your photo (e.g. 4288 x 2848). Full size uploads will count against your Google Drive storage quota. If you run out of Google Drive storage quota we'll automatically start uploading photos at standard size.
  
  It's not necessary for you to purchase additional storage, but if you'd prefer to continuing uploading and storing full size uploads, additional storage is available for purchase. Learn how to get the most out of your storage.
   
• Standard size photos are best for web sharing. If your preference is to have your photos uploaded at standard size, photos will be resized to 2048 pixels on the longest edge. You can store an unlimited number of standard size photos on Google+.