Wednesday, January 02, 2013

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.

19 comments:

  1. Me and Mommy slept thru all the New Years stuff but we DID wanna apologize for not being here in a long time. My favorite human brother is still very sick so mommy gone a lot. She will try harder to visit..

    Thank you for the info. I still can't get the info on what my storage is.

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  2. You do such a great job explaining that techy stuff!

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  3. OMC Mom loves it! She just downloaded the FreeSizer and tried it out! It's wonderful! It's quick and easy (which is purrfect for her).

    Thanks for your help!!

    The Florida Furkids and Mom Sharon

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  4. Mess, what mess?!? LOL!

    We're glad there is more free and accessible storage for pics and such things!! Yay!!

    Happy New Year! Take care
    x

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  5. Um, SOMEBUDDY had fun withs some stuffin'...hehehe. What a great foto!

    We had foto problems and it seemed to work itself out...fur now.

    Puddles

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  6. Good information Jan. I have a good resizing program at the moment. Hope you have a great New Year and maybe we will see ML back here soon.

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  7. Thank´s for the tip on freesizer !
    I have made mom download it for me/us :)

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  8. we hate it when the gremlins upload stuff overnight!!!

    Thanks for the info - mom is gonna sit down over the weekend and figure this out....the way she is doing it now is miserable :)

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  9. Jan thanks again for posting about this. I know it affects a lot of the CB's and it's important to understand so you don't get caught with not being able to upload pictures. Also thanks for the website to just resize.

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  10. Weird, we had no idea about the Picasa thing! I hope they haven't somehow been secretly charging us! As far as we know our pics are still free... but the freesizer thing sounds cool!

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  11. Dear Jan!
    Yous ROCKS! Yous explains it so well. Another thing is to reuse, not reload pictues, Delete pictures yous is not going to use again from 2 years ago and if yous wants to post a picture from someone else 's blog, use the image url.
    Thanks yous and HAPPY NEW YEAR!
    kisses
    Nellie

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  12. Yikes, didn't realize that this had happened... hope it doesn't happen on Flikr as well...

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  13. I think Jan can figure out who made the mess. Thanks for the great info. I will check everything out very soon.

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  14. grate shreddin job if we may say sew...larry, moe N curly !!! :)

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  15. When we first started blogging, we never knew about having to rezize photo's..untill it cost us £25 for one month..We have it sorted now,like you rezizing all the photo's. That's great letting every one know, especially new bloggers.. Happy New Year to you all xx00xx

    Mollie and Alfie

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  16. Thanks for providing people with that freesizer. We use Photoshop Elements to "save for web," but I know many others could really use that info you provided.

    Happy New Year!

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  17. We arent havin anny problems yet, but thanks fer such a great list of helpful stuff if (when) we do!

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  18. I use Irfan to resize my photos. I can cut, crop, and do a number of other things, including a batch resize - meaning I can resize a whole folder of images at the same time.

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  19. Mom had no idea about resizing photos until she runned out of room. That's why we gots our very own blog, but now she knows she has more room, but we're gonna make her keep ours, MOL.

    Sasha, Sami, & Saku

    Thanks to Jeanne at Random Felines for letting her readers know you had found the solution! I do have one question that you might be able to help me with. I see I have multiples of certain pics in my album...any idea how to delete some?

    Thanks,
    Eileen

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