As I have previously written, HERE, I have been mystified as to why my Picasa Web Albums has stopped working for me. I can no longer upload nor download my full size images. I finally found a way of contacting the Google people at Picasa Web Albums and at that point I was able to see a synopsis of my account. That is when I made the discovery that after having uploaded about 160 albums of my images and paying for a second year of storage, Google in its infinite wisdom seems to have canceled my account. It took over a month of troubleshooting until I discovered this, as Google never offered me one iota of notification of this change. I finally came across a notation at the Google site where my account was cancelled when I requested refund of a $5.00 overcharge, a Google error. It is very disappointing, as I have been a big fan of Picasa2 and Picasa Web Albums. I even get emails from others asking my advice on using the various features of both Picasa2 and Picasa Web Albums. And NO, Google never even gave me a refund for the year’s storage that I paid for, that it canceled. NOTHING! ZILCH!
I am back at Flickr now – it is easier to understand and use: http://flickr.com/photos/neddy/sets/ I suspect that Google has lost interest in keeping up with the Picasa2 and the Web Albums wing of its empire, hence the shoddy servicing of its photography software and storage accounts. I have had to uninstall the Picasa2 software for the first time ever, as it stopped working after its latest upgrade to a half dozen or so obscure languages, that I will never use.
It will truly be a shame if Google has ruined Picasa2 as it has been a wonderful photo editing software. Fortunately, I have just discovered Picnik, which seems to be very similar to Picasa2. I will be evaluating it with my Christmas pictures and learning to use it. Perhaps I will be able to survive my photographic life without Picasa2.
Vanishing Memories 
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I received an answer from Picasa Support about my picture image quality. I do not really understand it, but it does seem to explain what I have been asking about since November 2007. Here it is:
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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