Google is finally offering Picasa users more storage. Unfortunately, it's for a price albeit a significantly decreased one. Google has always had a paid option for additional storage space for those who'd fill up the free space provided by Picasa or Gmail, but now the company has slashed the prices while also increasing the amounts of storage available.

“People today have more personal data online than ever before. More and more people are starting to move the bulk of their data off the desktop and into servers "in the cloud," where it's accessible from any computer or mobile device and easily shareable with friends and family,” Elvin Lee, Google software engineer, writes. “While the cost of hard drive storage has continued to drop in these two years, we've also been working hard to improve our infrastructure to reduce your costs even further. Today we're dramatically lowering our prices to make extra storage even more affordable.”

And you can't really argue with the prices, Google has doubled the storage space available for the cheapest options to 20 GB, while cutting down the price from $20 to just $5 per year. Google says that's enough for some 10,000 photos at a full five megapixel resolution and a huge amount of emails. Prices go up from here with 400 GB for $100 a year, 1 TB for $256 a year all the way to 16 TB for $4,096. It’s not $4,000 but $4,096, as in 2^12. Yeah, Googlers are a geeky bunch even when it comes to pricing. Now $4,096 per year may not seem exactly cheep, but if you're going to need 16 TB of online storage for photos, you can probably afford it.

When Gmail launched it, it came with just 1 GB of free storage, a huge amount at a time when Hotmail was offering 2 MB and Yahoo 4 MB. Since then, it has grown to over 7 GB, but some manage to fill that up as well, some people love their email. With Picasa though, things aren't so rosy, 1 GB of storage, which is what the service currently offers, is hardly enough to have an online photo collection and Google could have at least doubled that along with the new paid storage options. On the other hand, paying $5 isn't exactly going to keep you from sleeping at night. The problem is that it's only available for photos and emails, Picasa and Gmail, and the storage isn't destined as a generic cloud back-up of sorts. There are ways of getting around this and using the space as an external drive, Gladinet Cloud Desktop for example, but Google still hasn't released the mythical Gdrive that has been rumored for years.