Recently I spoke about copyrighted pics and bloggers getting into trouble here. The easiest way is to make your own pics and post them, the second easiest it to go through copyright free websites like Creative Commons.
Here are some lessons I have learned with my Picasa albums and Blogger posts.
If you have a Blogger blog then where you upload your pictures, be it post, sidebar, footer, header etc, they will automatically go into an album at Picasa as it is owned by Blogger.
Unfortunately, no one tells you to limit your pics to a specific size so your albums do not fill up and leave you with no space.
I can’t even remember why I visited my Picasa album but I found I had already used 95% of my total 100%. I quickly had to do something and had I have known sooner, would have made my copyrighted pictures less than 800 pixels as well. I will be doing it from now on.
1 – Keep your pictures to less than 800 pixels on the largest side. Even if you make it large or extra large in the blog post dashboard, as long as it is less than 800, your Picasa album will not fill up. I go for 795. For those who don’t know how to resize, you can use Picasa itself, it does reduce the size of the photo and thus gives you more space. But at this stage I don’t know if it does anything to the blog post and has any ramifications through other sites you send you blog through (see #3). MS Office, any camera software you may have, even Adobe will do the trick.
2 – Copyright your images just in case. Some of mine have been used on eBay so I put a copyright on them and reloaded them into the blog posts. Then I deleted the old ones from Picasa to make room. You can choose a watermark or just write on the photo with software.
3 – If your blog posts automatically to another site like Tumblr because you’ve used Hootsuite, Tweetdeck or Dlvr.it, be prepared to lose pictures in posts as they don’t fix themselves if you do it in Blogger. My Tumblr posts have pictures missing but there’s not a whole lot I can do about it.
4 – You can also upload large size pics through your Google+ page if you have one. They allow free storage for them as it resizes to a specific size. Those albums will automatically be in your Picasa web albums, and when you need to post a pic in a blog post, just click on use your Picasa albums instead. The more you reuse the photos in your Picasa album, the less you need to upload, the less space you use.
5 – You can also store your pics at places like Photobucket and Flickr, but I have found if those sites are down, so are your pictures.
So, overall, be careful and be warned. Check your Picasa albums weekly to make sure everything’s okay. Make sure every picture you upload to your blog is less than 800 pixels. And make sure you you copyright your pics.
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