Picasaweb storage upgrade allows more photos per album

Picasa Web Albums have been offering paid storage upgrades for a while now.  As well as the simple increase in storage space, a paid upgrade also increases the number of photos permitted within each album.

Free Picasa Web Album accounts are allowed up to 500 photos per album.

Paid accounts are allowed double that, at 1000 photos per album.

One such gallery that is taking advantage of this is LaurasCoop which has a number of albums containing 900+ photos each.

New version of IrfanView v3.99

Although Picasa is great for organizing your photos on your hard drive, there are plenty of times when you need access to other programs, such as for simply viewing the contents of a CD without copying to your harddrive, or for image editing beyond the simple methods provided by Picasa.

One popular freeware program that offers theses features is IrfanView, which has come out with a new version, v3.99.  It's been approximately a year since the last version, and the list of changes is extensive.  Of course, since IrfanView adopts a plugin architecture (something Picasa would do well to adopt) the long list of new features does not necessarily mean a more bloated program - if you don?t want the feature, then you don't need to install that plugin.

Farewell Bloggerbot

Christina, the official Picasa spokeswoman on the Picasa Google Groups has formally noted the passing of the Bloggerbot for posting pictures from Picasa's Hello instant messaging program.

The Farewell Bloggerbot post states:

Dear users,

We'd like to thank those of you who have been devoted fans of Bloggerbot -- the photo uploading feature in Picasa's Hello instant messaging program. Unfortunately, Bloggerbot is not compatible with the newest version of Blogger and will no longer upload photos to your blog.

For those of you still using the older version of Blogger, Bloggerbot will continue to work for a short while before being discontinued. At that time, you'll no longer be able to use Bloggerbot to send pictures to your old Blogger account. (And no, if you have already started using the new version of Blogger, you can't revert to the old version just to keep using Bloggerbot. Sorry.)

As an alternative for posting multiple photos at once to your blog, you may want to try Picasa's "BlogThis!" button.  It uploads four photos at a time to your blog. Or, you can directly upload your photos through the Blogger dashboard.

To upload photos through "BlogThis!":
http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=31292

To upload photos through the Blogger Dashboard:
http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=41641&query=upload%20pho...

We're investigating some issues that people have reported when using Picasa's "BlogThis!" button with the new version of Blogger. The known issues are listed here:
http://knownissues.blogspot.com/search/label/blogthis

Please let us know if you see any other problems. As Picasa and Blogger look forward to the New Year, our resolution is to find newer, better ways for you to share photos and videos with your family and friends.

Rest in peace, Bloggerbot. We'll miss you.

Those that used the BloggerBot will notice that the suggested alternatives are not nearly as powerful - in particular the BloggerBot did not have the "4 photos only" restriction.  The passing of Bloggerbot was announced last November.

More Tips from Mike DelGaudio

Mike continues to provide useful and informative tips and techniques on Picasa on his blog.

Amongst the latest post of note are:

• Adding captions to picture pile collages
• Picasa can zoom with a gesture
• Create your own Warhol

Although I noted this blog as being a new blog in December, I've since found out that it's a continuation of his earlier blog Photo Editing with Picasa. Although that is no longer being updated, its back catalogue of posts contains a wealth of useful information. My pick includes:

• Adding Keywords to Photos in Bulk using Picasa
• Create a Multi-Exposure effect with Picasa
• Picasa Thumbnail Icons Explained
• 5 ways to create black and white images in Picasa

I've already noted Mike has a Picasa Web Album, but he also uses other photo sharing services, with collections of images on both flickr and zooomr.

A major Picasaweb user - with 70,000 photos

The Boardy Barn is a serious party venue in Hampton Bays, Long Island, New York.  If you visit their home page, you will also see they are a major user of Picasa Web Albums.

They link through to two galleries on Picasa Web Albums

• boardybarnpixs - with over 50,000 photos in 183 albums
• boardybarnpics - currently with over 22,000 photos in 102 albums

That's certainly a lot of photos - though it has to be said they are not fine art, consisting as they do mostly of snapshots of party goers.

I guess that they did the maths, and determined that paying for Picasa Web Albums was a cheap way to host this number of photos.  (It looks as if previously they were using Webshots for hosting).

If you've got that volume of photos to upload, the convenience of the Picasa desktop applications for uploading must be hard to beat.