Picasa Now Offers Free Unlimited Storage for Small Photos and Short Videos

On Friday Google officially announced new changes to their Picasa storage policy.  These changes affect all users, regardless of if you  have paid for extra storage or not.  From now on, any photos that you have uploaded that “are 800 pixels or smaller and videos that are 15 minutes or less in length no longer count” towards your storage limit.  Now you have a new place to host your Twitter media files!

800 pixels and 15 minutes

Okay, this is a huge deal.  Free photo storage, and free video storage – from Google!  But, the only catch is that your photos have to be smaller than 800 pixels.  What do this mean?  Well, then max resolution of any photo is capped at 800×800 pixels..  Here’s some examples:

• 801×100 – Not free
• 1×1000 – Not free
• 1280×1024 – Definitely not free
• 800×800 – Free
• 640×480 – Free

Videos on the other hand don’t have such resolution limits.  This means if you have some sweet 1080p clips and you need a free spot to host them, you could use Picasa.  The catch with videos is that you have a 15 minute length limit, and the 1GB file size limit still applies.

Multiple photo uploads, better limits, new interface

When Google changed around the policy to give away free space to small photos, they also changed the way you upload photos.   There is no longer 5 Choose File button slots for deciding what you would like to upload.  Instead, you can now upload as many as you like, it just takes a little bit of keyboard gusto.

When you choose files, it will open an explorer window.  From here just Select which photos you would like to upload.  To do this, there are a few different ways:

• Draw a Select box around the photos you would like to upload by holding down the Left mouse button.
• Hold the Ctrl key and individually Select each photo you would like to upload.
• Hold Shift and Click the row of pictures you would like to upload.

Picasa Storage Prices

Don’t forget, you aren’t limited to only uploading small photos and videos.  But, if you have a free account you will still be limited to a total of 1GB space on your account for anything that doesn’t count as a freebie. Upgrading isn’t exactly expensive; you can get 20GB for just $5.  What it comes down to, is do you like Picasa enough to pay for it, and do you trust Google with your data?  We’ve voiced our concerns about Picasa privacy issues in the past, but all in all they seem to have the same terms of service as other popular providers.