Tuesday, January 15, 2013

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+.

26 comments:

  1. Thanks for all the very useful information you have presented here. I have used Gimp. Those familiar with Photoshop will find it relatively easy to learn.

    Another benefit of only posting standard sized (low resolution) photos on your web pages is that it discourages people from copying them. They could use them in web pages but they won't look good printed out.

    Standard sized photos are also more accessible for your readers. I have a fast machine and internet connection, but I have left pages because I lost patience waiting for the high resolution photos to load.

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    1. limbe dolls - I agree Gimp is easy compared to Photoshop. For those true beginners, Picnik was much better. I have recommended Gimp, but after getting complaints that it's hard, I want to find something easier for the beginners. Thanks for the additional information. I, too, have left pages that were loading too slow.

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  2. Hi Vanessa, thanks for this needed information. I was so upset when I received the notice about purchasing, I was going to stop blogging because I thought this was something that should have been revealed at the onset! Not to be defeated, I searched for a solution and am now using Google+ and the standard sizing. So far, I'm ok with it, but miss the nice pics from before.
    If it is ok with you, will you mind if I post about this and direct readers to your blog? So many are having trouble with this. Thanks again for this post!
    Well Wishes, Loretta

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    1. Loretta - Glad you found out the information before buying more storage. If it's any consolation, I didn't even notice a change in your pictures. Feel free to direct people to the post. I imagine a lot of people are dealing with this.

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  3. Thanks so much for the info, Vanessa. I learned many years ago that valuable files should always be backed up. One just never knows. I use thumb drives to store some of my stuff. Also, you can get an external hard drive for $100 or less to store files. Thanks also for the resizing info. I didn't know what to resize my photos to, so this helps me out a lot. I use Photoshop Elements. It's pretty easy to use and only $129 at Walmart.

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    1. Cindi - Thanks so much for the information! I was going to mention external hard drives, too. They are fairly inexpensive for the space they provide. Glad to know Photoshop Elements can be used without the other Photoshop program. I didn't know that.

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  4. Thank you for all this info. Acerico and I usually resize our images for that same reason, at the beginning we didn't do it and we realised our space was shrinking day by day... I'm going to try pxilr, it looks quite good, at least the advanced version!

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    1. Rossetti - It's good you two caught on quickly. Most don't realize what's happening until it's too late.

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  5. Thank you so much for sharing this! I immediately went to check and saw that I'd already used 1GB. Luckily, mine had been posting to Google+ Photos instead of the Google Drive. It's strange since I didn't have a Google+ account, but I made one and was able to access every photo I'd ever uploaded. Google+ Photos can apparently be resized using that program even after they're posted without affecting how they show up on a blog. With that and deleting extra shots that weren't in use, I was able to cut my storage usage down a great deal. So thank you for saving me a lot of pain in the future!

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    1. Alura - Glad I could help. Thanks for sharing your experience with Google+ Photos. I'm sure that will be helpful to someone.

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  6. Thanks! I'll be sure to try to figure out what can help me when I get the chance. I'm still steaming that we don't get unlimted photo space. I mean, really, why hold us back? There making plenty of money, and now they charge us for this? (Sorry for the rant :)

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    1. Verona - You're welcome. No need to rant. As long as you resize or use standard size mentioned in the post, you do have unlimited storage. It's only when they are full size that the 5GB comes into play. Having everyone upload full size images, unnecessarily, would potentially cause lots of problems for the program and all of us who use it. I'm sure they put the 5GB limit in place just to bring this to everyone's attention. It will take forever to use up 5GB when resizing the images or setting up the standard setting in Google. And when it is used up, the cost of additional space is pretty cheap.

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  7. Hello from Spain: thanks for this information so interesting. I suffered the problem memory google ... I also keep all photos on flash drives, USB. ... Keep in touch

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    1. Marta - You can still go back and reduce the image sizes if you want to.

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  8. Thanks again Vanessa. I am back on track, but not sure if it is only temporary. I am going to double check things using the advice you gave. I am also going to print and post it on my bulletin board. Whew! Blogging is harddd! LOL

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    1. Grandmommy - Glad you are back on track. If you need more help, just let me know.

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  9. You did it again! A great post and very informative. It helped me out so much when you mention that to me!

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    1. Ms. Leo - I'd been meaning to do this post for a while. The D7ana post finally got me to get it done.

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  10. Thanks, Vanessa.

    I know a couple of people who exhausted their free image capacity because of their over-sized blog images.

    dbg

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    1. DBG - Welcome. Rsizing images is not an intuitive thing.

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  11. Thanks so much Vanessa! You know I needed this!! Lol! I plan to work on this weekend and hopefully get back to blogging.

    Excellent post my friend!

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    1. Georgia Girl - You are welcome. I'm looking forward to a new post from you!

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  12. I guess I'm lucky. My daughter does my photos and as she's a web and print designer automatically resized my photos from the beginning. However, as we also have lost photos in the past due to computer problems, we also store photos on external hard drives. For extra security, or if you are storing really important information, you should also store your external hard drives in a different location to your computer - so I keep getting told.

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    1. Carrickters - What! You have an assistant. Do you know how long I've wanted an assistant. Just having someone to put everything back after I finish dios would be great. Or having someone organize the doll room in a pretty fashion. Or having someone list all the dolls I want to sell. Or, or, or....

      I can think of a million things for my non-existent assistant to do. But then that would take away all my fun.

      Thanks for your comments.

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  13. I noticed when I tried to make a video of pictures that were small, the quality of the pictures in the video was so good. I need larger picture size like 1024x768 for video. Can I re-size them up to get that?

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    1. Ms. Leo - It depends. I would need more info. Are you trying to go back and improve videos you already have loaded? There have been some changes to YouTube and some of my older videos don't look like they originally did. There is a new feature on Youtube that allows you to enhance the quality of your video. You may want to try that. I had success with one video, but not with one of the others.

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