How to Avoid Running Out of Picture Space in Blogger

In the last month or so I've had two friends mention that they've reached their allotted space in picture storage on Blogger. Did you even know that was possible? I didn't. If you use Blogger, then your pictures are stored in Picasa web albums. To find out how much storage you are using, you can log in to Picasa and scroll to the bottom, where you'll see some text like this.

I've been writing at this domain for about 5 years, and I've used less than 20% of my storage space. This is, in part, because I do not post a ton of pictures to my blog. The other part is that starting a few years ago I started re-sizing my images before posting them to my blog. I didn't do this because of the space issue; in fact, I didn't even know about the space limit until very recently. I started re-sizing my images because they took so long to load, and for the most part I don't think anybody is clicking on the images to view the giant full size image anyway.

I copy the images I plan to put on my blog into a folder reserved specifically for images for my blog. This allows me to edit the images any way I like without messing up the original. From the "For Blog" folder (yes, that is actually what it is called), I open the image up in Microsoft Office's photo software. It's not the best software, but it does the job. (I also use Picasa for things like adjusting color and fixing red-eye because it works better than Microsoft's software. But when I'm just re-sizing, Microsoft is fast and easy.) Once the picture is opened, select Picture, then Resize. At the top you can see what percentage you are viewing the original image, and at the right you can change it by percentage.

I have also recently started using Picasa to create photo collages since Blogger changed the way you can work with pictures. I re-size the collages too because they also are huge. I learned how to create collages in Picasa with Janssen's brief tutorial.

So there you go. I'd hate for you to have to go to the hassle to create an entirely new blog because you've run out of space in Picasa. You can thank me later. Or now. Either works.