Picasa web albums is often considered Google’s answer to Flickr. That might be the intention on Google’s part, but fact is Flickr is leagues ahead of Picasa. The first choice for people to share or store photos are on Facebook. Thanks to confusion on Facebook’s privacy settings, a lot of people end up saving or storing their photo albums on Flickr or Picasa.
Picasa web albums allowed free space upto 1 GB. 1 GB might be a lot when it comes to email or even documents but when it comes to photos that space can be filled up quite quickly.
Unlimited storage space
One problem is that all the images you share on Google Buzz or even a blog on Blogger platform, the images are stored in Picasa Web Albums. This means that the images though small-sized can end up eating into your Picasa web space.
Google announced that from now on if the image is less than 800 pixels or if the video is less than 15 minutes long, those files will not count towards the 1GB limit.
So basically if you are uploading decent sized image files, you have unlimited storage capacity.
Why offering unlimited storage space is important for Google?
Google might need to offer either more space or unlimited cloud storage space when it comes to photo albums. The reason for that is Chrome OS, which promises the dream of storing all things you need on the cloud. Without unlimited storage not many people would adopt using Google services. This is especially true when it comes to family photos and videos which is what end up being shared on Picasa web albums.
Flickr is a great product and surely far ahead of Picasa, but they have a familiar problem that is symptomatic of Yahoo acquired companies. The symptom of lack of innovation. In the past year or so, I have not seen anything radically innovative from Flickr and such complacency ends up giving competitors a free hand. In this case it just might be Picasa.
We will just have to wait and see, but in the meanwhile I am sure we all with enjoy the unlimited storage space from Picasa. Do drop in your comments.
Source: Google Photos
5 Comments
This is a great news from Google. I had to create new account for storing my pics, now I will be able to store it at one place. Thanks Aditya for the Post.
Thanks for the comment and yes it is great news indeed if you are storing stuff on picasa web albums.
So now we can find our favorite images at one place and no worry to lose them. Thanks for suggesting.
I think picasa, is catching up with flickr…. I used to use flickr some years ago….and as u upload more and more images..the older images seems to be geting lost…i mean i couldn’t find it…they say that every months u get some space for ur new images…
But i couldn’t actually get concept of flickr….
But here in Picasa…no matter what u’ll getting 1 gb….now its upon u how u use it…..
By the way thanks for ur blog….its really informative..kepp up the good work
thanks for your comment. I do not use Flickr as much as before and I do think nothing new is happening with Flickr for over a year now. Picasa is backed by Google and that might end up being the difference.