I finally got around to making this test of Picasa Web Albums with Cudleigh Cougar. I have ranted a number of times of my dismay at having my images made much smaller when I upload them from Picasa2 to Picasa Web Albums. Google wrote and told me that was caused by my editing of my images before uploading. Duh? Isn’t that what Picasa2 is for? Isn’t Picasa2 supposed to be a photo editing software program?
IMAGE QUALITY
You mentioned that the files you downloaded from Picasa Web Albums were not the same size as the original files that you uploaded. The difference in photo file size can be attributed to any edits that you made within Picasa before you uploaded. After you make edits to your photo, Picasa needs to then re-sample the image to create a new version of the jpeg (apart from the original). This requires Picasa to apply an amount of jpeg compression to your photo. In order to incorporate your photo edits into your uploaded image, the actual size of the uploaded photo is therefore less than the full photo file.
If you made no edits to your photos and uploaded it at the ’slowest upload; largest size setting,’ you would find the full photo file uploaded.
You can control the jpeg compression level of your files by using the ‘Export’ option before you upload to Picasa Web Albums. For more information on exporting photos, please visit
http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=13821
If you’d like to go into more depth about the compression of unsaved edits upon upload, please read this informative post in our user group at
http://groups.google.com/group/PicasaGuide/browse_thread/thread/a21c26049b83ebb0/d1ec931bf26518b4?
Whatever, … here I am performing a test. I am uploading these two “unedited” images of Cudleigh Cougar at the “slowest” upload, largest size, using the “Web Album” button in Picasa2. Image cudleigh001 is 3264×2448 pixels, 4.5 MB, and Image cudleigh002 is 3264×2448 pixels, 4.8 MB, in Picasa2, on my computer.
After uploading to Picasa Web Albums (which is incredibly easy with the Picasa2 software) I then downloaded one image back to my computer, and sure enough, the Google guy was correct. I was able to download the full size that I had uploaded. Now that was only because I had NOT “edited” the photo. Once a photo is edited in Picasa2 – everything changes, and much smaller images are sent to the Internet. It doesn’t make sense, but that is the way it is.
Then I did a second test, this time sending an entire batch of “edited” images to Picasa Web Albums. You can read about that here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/barneykin/GrandBarneySFarmBell
, and know why I am now using Flickr for most of my photo album storage, even though I continue to love using Picasa2 software.
