Picasa Makes It Official, All Small Photos and Videos are Stored for Free

Google has made it official and announced that small photos and relatively short videos in Picasa no longer count towards the free storage quota and can essentially be stored for free. This means that you'll be able to make the most out of the rather paltry 1GB of free space you get with Picasa Web Albums, depending on what you're using it for.

"With Picasa Web Albums, you automatically get one gigabyte of free storage. As some of you may have noticed, we recently changed the way storage works so you can continue to share and store images even after you fill up that free gig.In the past, each image and video you uploaded counted toward your free 1GB," Matt Steiner, Engineering Lead-Photos Team, wrote.

"Now, uploaded images that are 800 pixels or smaller and videos that are 15 minutes or less in length no longer count against your free storage limit. This means you can upload and store unlimited photos and videos at the above sizes -- for free!," he announced.

The change has been active for more than a week now, even though people first though it was an error in the way Picasa counted the size of the files. Google confirmed the change in the Picasa help pages, but only now made it official.

If you're using Picasa for your blog or just to display images on the web, 800 pixels should be plenty for most cases. So the 1 GB storage limit is moot, you'll never run out of space if you use small images.

As for video, it's even better, any video under 15 minutes in length, even HD ones, can be stored for free. This brings Picasa on par with YouTube, but it does create an interesting disparity.

A photo larger than 800 pixes, which may only be a few hundreds of kilobytes is counted while HD videos which may weigh hundreds of megabytes won't.

Still it's an welcomed change. And if you really need more space, Google can sell it to you at very affordable rates. Paying for online storage may seem strange, especially since it's coming from Google, but with $5 you can get 20 GB, you really can't complain.