Free unlimited photos on Blogger

JOHN KRATZ

Now, when you upload an image into your blog, it will never count towards the storage you have from Google.

That's the result of two recent changes to how Blogger handles images.

Consequently it is no longer necessary to resize images before adding them to your blog.

This is a handy new feature, though a small class of bloggers may be inconvenienced by it.

The story thus far

Google Drive currently provides 15 GB of free online storage with every account.

This includes photos and Gmail emails and attachments, as well as Google Drive docs. Users can add to that allotment as needed.

Originally, Google provided smaller chunks of free storage for different services (it's complicated).

Still, it excluded from the storage quota any Blogger photos that were no larger than 800 pixels in either height or width.

You could add as many images as you liked to your blog as long as you resized them to fit. Those photos simply didn't count.

When Google+ was introduced, Google offered an incentive. If you linked your blog to Google+, the maximum image size would be 2,048 pixels on a side.

The old 800-pixel threshold remained for regular blogger accounts.

What's new

Since then, Google has made the following two significant changes:

• It extended the more-generous 2,048-pixel threshold to all accounts
• It began automatically resizing all photos uploaded into Blogger to fit into the 2,048-pixel cap.

The result is that today any image you upload into your blog is resized so as not to count towards your storage quota.

You no longer have to worry about storage when you upload pictures to your blog.

High-but-not-highest quality

A similar option is available as a choice in Google Photos, Google's online photo storage. But for Blogger, it is not just on by default, there is no option to change it.

Above: Preferences from Google Photos, where upload quality is a choice. There's no choice in Blogger.

Google's name for this option, "high quality," is a little confusing. If you upload a larger image under this option it will be shrunk, with some loss of quality.

But it's justified, because for most of us 2,048 pixels is high quality.

Doubly so for Blogger, because your blog can't display big images at high-res anyway. Blogger compresses the image to fit before rendering it.

What's lost

The only people who might be inconvenienced by this change are those who use their blogs to make very large images available on the web. Presumably these people pay Google for extra storage.

This is not most Bloggers. But now these folks will have to find another workflow.

One option: Upload to Photos at "original" quality, then insert each into the blog using "add from url."

Still resize anyway?

With this move, Google has simplified blogging by eliminating the need to resize photos before upload.

You might still want to downsize images. A small image can't be stolen and used in (say) a large printed photo spread, precisely because it is not a high-quality version.

Smaller photos still work in your blog, which is a low-res environment that does not need a lot of pixels.

However, you no longer have to resize to avoid using your storage quota.

It's taken care of.

Note well

• Blogger stashes your uploaded images in a Media Manager album. Yours is here.
• These albums are not the same thing as Google Photos.
• Use Google Photos to share, annotate, classify, manage, and sort your images. You can't do anything like that in the Blogger media manager.
• Previously, you had to resize your blogger images if you wanted unlimited photos on Blogger. You don't have to do that any more, though you still can.
• For more information, check out all my posts about images on Blogger.