I was at the “Official Google Photos Blog” (News, Tips and Tricks from the Picasa Team at Google) and read the following blog post about backing up photographs:
“Sleep soundly: Back up your photos”
Thursday, March 13, 2008 8:31 PM
Posted by Mark Muse, Consumer Operations Strategist
The good news is that Picasa makes it easy to back up your memories. You can always upload your photos to Picasa Web Albums - choose ‘Slowest upload - largest size’ in the upload dialogue box to secure your photos in full resolution.
The BAD NEWS is that the above statment is FALSE. I know a thing or two about Picasa Web Albums. I have written extensively about them on the Internet. I subscribed to them since they were first made available and uploaded thousands of my photographs there. Let me warn you that the above advice is very wrong. “Your photos in full resolution” are NOT “SECURE” at Picasa Web Albums. Mine have all been lost. What I have left are drastically reduced images that are of little value to me. Go see for yourself what are left of the thousands of 2-3 MB each photographs that I uploaded with the “Slowest Upload.” Oh yes, they originally uploaded fine and I was able to download the original sizes — UNTIL one day in October or November of 2007, when unbeknownst to me, GOOGLE reduced them all, each and every one!
I went to the place where I was directed from the “Official Google Photos Blog” to ask for help and there was a post from an “Official” at Google claiming to want to help if there was: “Something Broken in Picasa Web Albums?” That incredulous statement blew my mind. I could not help myself from ranting:
I have been trying to get help for My Picasa Web Albums that stopped working when I paid for my second year in November 2007. I made repeated emails to Google and repeated postings at help groups. NOTHING!!!!
I have had to stop using Picasa Web Albums for my photos and I went back to Flickr. I don’t like it at all that Picasa started making my photographs smaller when I upload or download them, since I am a PAYING customer. I am not a newby - I have been using Flickr for years and Picasa Web Albums since the beginning.
http://barneykin.wordpress.com/2007/11/27/picasa/
http://barneykin.wordpress.com/2007/12/16/picasa-web-albums-changed/
http://barneykin.wordpress.com/2007/12/20/picasa-web-albums-discovery/
http://barneykin.wordpress.com/2007/12/27/goodbye-picasa-web-albums/
http://picasaweb.google.com/barneykin/PicasaWebAlbumsNotWorking
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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?
Comment by Kerfuffles — May 17, 2008 @ 2:27 pm