Funny Farm Woofies and Picasa

Hey, it's us, the 3 stooges ... um, the 3 woofies of the funny farm.  We've been doing a lot of this (napping, not shredding cushions) and plan to do a lot more this winter.

As you already know, in December a lot of bloggers were hit with monthly storage charges for their Picasa account and some were forced to sign up with Google+ just to access their account.  It was not a fun time for many.  We were particularly upset that there was a problem over Google+ and Poppy Q's blog was deleted on the very day our Mousebreath interview with her published.  It was restored a couple of days later, but she missed out on the fun part of being interviewed.  (You can still read her interview here.)

We keep a close eye on our Picasa storage use and it went from 8 mb to 26 mb in the wink of an eye.  There was no way!  So Jan sat and added up the total size of all the blogs we own or help and guess what ....?  Yep, they'd counted every single photo in every album, most of which should not have counted. This is why the directions we posted a while back on how to resize your Picasa photos to make room for more did not work.

Before we continue, we'd like to say how grateful we are that Google allows us to blog and post photos for free.  This fits perfectly into our budget.  But we don't understand how and why this happened and so many bloggers were charged for extra storage when Google was planning to upgrade.

A couple of weeks after finding we'd evidently been posting huge photos in our sleep (8 to 26 mb, remember!), our storage suddenly went from 1 gb to 5 gb.  Thank you, Google!  We are so grateful to have even more free storage.  But what went wrong in your upgrade of our accounts that our storage was first downgraded?  What about all those bloggers who had to pay or sign up for Google+, which they didn't want?

Well, the good news is that you need to check your Picasa storage use again and make sure your account has been upgraded (5 gb free storage + whatever storage you paid for = ) and then you can cancel your paid storage before the next payment comes due.  (JB Bean canceled her extra storage plan without a problem.)

We were suggesting bloggers who don't have Photoshop or another photo editor to resize the photos they post download the free Picasa for their computer.  Some of you didn't want a big program or want to fool with learning it just to resize photos, so have we got good news for you!

Mr. Doug (Jan's brother) sent her a link last month to a free resize program and after protesting she didn't need another photo program, she watched the video and then downloaded the program to try it.  She loves it.  See, this is just a little program that does absolutely nothing except resize photos for posting, emailing, etc.

It is so easy to use!  Just drag photo(s) into it.  The first time she tried it, she resized 30 Christmas ecards in a second. It retains the same file name and adds "resized" to the file to ID it.  (Jan changed it to "rszd" for our photos.)  It does not alter your original and adds the rszd copy to the same folder unless you tell it differently.

You can resize for email (we use this setting for Blogger photos), instant messenger,  social networks, iPhone/iPod, original size compressed, or custom.

The program is called Freesizer.  You can watch a video of how easy it is to use here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Zpl5d379p0

And if you like it, you can download it here - http://www.freesizer.com/

The photo of us at the top of this post was resized in Picasa which we have on our computer.  It is 800 x 451 pixels and 213 kb.

Then we ran it through Freesizer for "email" and it is now 800 x 451 pixels and 73 kb. (Click on it to enlarge.)

This is not a review.  We are using this program and find it helpful, so we're sharing with you in case you'd like to try it.

Oh, a quick review, in case you don't know or have forgotten how to find your storage use.

Go to Google.com
Top -  click on "More"
Click on "Photos" in drop down box

If you're signed into your blog, Picasa will open.  If not signed in, you'll need to sign in.

At the very bottom of the page, you should find these two lines  ---

You are currently using "X" MB (X.XX %) of your 5120 MB. Upgrade Storage
(Google copyright info line)

In the event you can't find it at the very bottom of the main page (where you see all your albums)  ---

Go to the top of that page and click on "Upload"
Look in the sidebar on the right.  There should be a bar showing your online storage and useage.
(Mine goes from 0 to 5120 mb -- do you have the same??????)

Online storage:
0  -   5120 MB
  "X" MB Storage used
5112 MB Storage remaining

Hope 2013 started off well for you.  Have a good day.