This is peripherally cycling related: If any of you use Google Picasa for hosting pictures and videos from bike rides and races, I had a bit of a surprise with that yesterday.
When I wanted to upload pictures from my long ride in Miura, I got a message telling me I was over my space limit, something like "21345 MB (100%) out of 1024 MB" and offering me to upgrade my plan from free to paid. I previously had a paid Google Picasa plan, 80 GB for $20 per year which was pretty decent, but switched back to the free plan. However, their current prices are 2.4-4.8 higher per GB than the plan I used to have (e.g. $30/yr for 25 GB and $60 per year for 100 GB). The old plan is no longer available to free account customers.
As it turned out, no paid upgrade is needed. The basic reason I had discontinued the paid plan was that I found out that images up to 1600x1200 pixels and videos up to 10 minutes did not actually count towards the limit. I can live with that for all my pictures. The limit has actually been raised to 2048x2048 pixels and videos of up to 15 minutes. So if you go with the default and have your uploaded pics resized to fit within the resolution limit, you still don't need to fork out cash. You can just tell the Picasa app to no longer show the warning and click "OK" and it will go ahead and keep uploading.
Google hasn't tightened up anything, they just added an ominous sounding warning to create a bit of friction to get people to pull out their credit cards.
Whew! They almost got my money!
When I wanted to upload pictures from my long ride in Miura, I got a message telling me I was over my space limit, something like "21345 MB (100%) out of 1024 MB" and offering me to upgrade my plan from free to paid. I previously had a paid Google Picasa plan, 80 GB for $20 per year which was pretty decent, but switched back to the free plan. However, their current prices are 2.4-4.8 higher per GB than the plan I used to have (e.g. $30/yr for 25 GB and $60 per year for 100 GB). The old plan is no longer available to free account customers.
As it turned out, no paid upgrade is needed. The basic reason I had discontinued the paid plan was that I found out that images up to 1600x1200 pixels and videos up to 10 minutes did not actually count towards the limit. I can live with that for all my pictures. The limit has actually been raised to 2048x2048 pixels and videos of up to 15 minutes. So if you go with the default and have your uploaded pics resized to fit within the resolution limit, you still don't need to fork out cash. You can just tell the Picasa app to no longer show the warning and click "OK" and it will go ahead and keep uploading.
Google hasn't tightened up anything, they just added an ominous sounding warning to create a bit of friction to get people to pull out their credit cards.
Whew! They almost got my money!
