Blogger Question About Photo Storage

Update, 8/28/12:
I found this on one of Google's help pages. 

Free storage limits

Photos up to 2048 x 2048 pixels and videos up to 15 minutes won't count towards your free storage.

Automatic resizing

All photos uploaded in Google+ will be automatically resized to 2048 pixels (on their longest edge) and won't count towards your free storage quota.

All photos uploaded from the Picasa software or in Picasa Web Albums over the free size limit will count towards your 1 GB of free storage. When you reach your storage limit, any new photos you upload larger than the free size limit will be automatically resized to 2048 pixels (on their longest edge).

Source: http://support.google.com/picasa/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1224181

----------------------------------------------------------

Original Post:

I was just updating my blog layout this afternoon, when I received a slightly alarming message from Blogger that read something like this:

"No more pictures for you."

Okay, not exactly.  What it really said was that my Picasa Web Album was full and I had exceeded the free storage space for photos.

There are different types of infinity, but, sadly, the internet is not one of them.

Eh, excuse me?

Then I proceeded to waste precious hours reading about the free storage available on Picasa (only 1 GB), which Blogger uses to store uploaded photos, and how I could purchase extra space for a monthly fee if I needed more room, and then I resorted to deleting as many photos as I could from my album (which I only use as a means to store photos for this blog).  This was a "beyond boring" way to spend my afternoon.  I really, really hope that I did not delete pictures that are included in my blog posts.  The album was not very user friendly, in my opinion.  It would have been really nice if the photos included information about where I was using them, but the only information that I could use to determine if a picture might be posted on my blog was the number of page views.  So basically, it was a big guessing game, which including looking through all of my posts since the beginning of time this blog in April 2011.  Apparently, Picasa continues to store all photos that were uploaded even if I did not actually publish them in a blog post.  There were many duplicates and sometimes a large number of page views were split between two duplicates (What does that mean exactly?).  I have reduced the used storage in my album to about 80%, but it is only a matter of time before I max it out again.

Dear Fellow Bloggers and Friends,

Is this a blogging problem that you have also encountered?
Do you have a solution to this problem?
Are you paying monthly fees for more photo space?

I love that blogging is a free and creative pastime.  I understand that web space is not really free and that Google is just extra-special-awesome for making so many things as close to free as they possibly can.  I already take advantage of many of these services: Gmail, YouTube, Blogger, and, I guess, Picasa, although I did not know that I was using the web album until today.  I am hoping that maybe there is an alternative to paying for more space, although I will admit that the fee for the next level is very small at about $2.50/month.

Test photo shared from a new location.  Pay no attention to the parrot in the foreground.  This photo is supposed to be of Rapa the Wonder Budgie.