Ever since Google’s Picasa2 software and then their Picasa Web Albums became available I have been their biggest fan and supporter. I have been uploading almost all of my digital images to my Picasa Web Albums, and seldom use my Flickr account anymore. That is now changing, as I find myself going back to Flickr. I have noticed that there is something amiss with the uploading features from Picasa2 to Picasa Web Albums. I have been troubleshooting it a bit, but I have not been able to discover what it is that is causing my images to be re-sized smaller. Apparently this has been going on for a while and I have not noticed it. That is, unless the entire Picasa Web Albums has done a global resizing of everyone’s photographs.
I have been checking the help and I see that it says one cannot upload photos larger than 20 MB. WELL! None of mine are anywhere near that large. And, I definitely do not like having my 1-2 1/2 MB images downsized to 500-600 KB without my knowing why. Does anyone know what’s up?
I was just billed last week for another year of service, so now I am wondering if instead of keeping my account the same, they have downgraded me for some reason. Does anyone else have this problem? Does anyone know what’s going on?
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I finally received a response from Google Support:
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?
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