Sunday 8 November 2009

On Running Out of Space in Blogger

No,I haven't, not yet, but Gary Rith has. He keeps doing that, so he's on Pottersblog NoIII
I was a bit worried that I might be running out of space in wherever my blog is kept, a shoebox on the top shelf, at the rear of one of Blogger's vast warehouse-caverns, I suspect.
How to know how much space I have left in my shoebox?

It turns out that blogger does not limit the size of the blog itself. The restriction is in the storage allotted to pictures, and pictures uploaded to blogger are held and retrieved from a Picasa web-album with a maximum size of 1024MB.
Put simply, your blog and its pictures are in separate shoe-boxes.
When you click on the "add image" icon, it opens another window. In the bottom right corner of that it tells you how much of your allotted space is in use. In my case, it says, right now "You are currently using 912MB (89%) of your 1024MB".

In my case the problem is not quite critical yet. I did a bit of searching. One method of dealing with it is to start a new blog, which was Gary's chosen route. This could be using the same template, same name even, just add a number. Or change one letter in the name. It would look the same.
Except, of course, there'd be no access back into the previous posts.
But there's another way. Just create another persona in blogger, and add that person as a contributor with full editorial rights to your existing blog. Your new persona has a completely fresh empty shoebox in the Blogger cavern, and posts added under the new persona don't impinge upon the
blog's original storage.
Thus, you get another year or so of posts before needing to create persona number 3.
You can help yourself by not uploading giant images, resize them to something less than the original.
Picasa's free image organiser/viewer has easy tools to do this. I use it as my default viewer and editor, I've tried others with vast resources which I never use, and Picasa's the one I like best. And I like that word "Free". It's less good on a mac, I hear.
Blogger's preferred route, of course, is to SELL you extra storage in your original account. Pthuie!


10 comments:

  1. Another thing you can do is to look through your Picasaweb shoebox and remove the multitude of duplicates (or in my case triplicates and more). They don't delete automatically when you delete a post, or if you delete an individual image from a post. You have to be careful not to remove any that ended up being published on the blog though.

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  2. You are so right, I just looked and... there are pentuplicates! The problem, as you sat is to figure out which are redundant. Agh. Delete at your peril, Beryl.
    What I find is that blogger, when I reached the 500 pic limit, just set off and created another album. And another, and another. With no rhyme or reason, I have EIGHT! Grit in the Gears albums, several with only one pic, one with fourteen, two with five hundred. And, because I tried out Wndows Livewriter, as a blogging editor, there's an album for that, too.
    And on browsing, I swear there are images that aren't in any blogpost, but how can I be sure? It would take forever.
    Oh pooh and fiddlesticks!

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  3. As you sat? I think I meant "as you SAY"
    Dyslexia lures.

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  4. I am working on the memory thing :)
    Had to move again

    http://garysthirdpotteryblog.blogspot.com/

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  5. Another 20 GB is only $5 a year. A YEAR! Sheesh. You want so much from your free host...

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  6. Mine says I'm using 6%. And I use a lot of pictures, I thought. You better lay off the movies and just hot link them to youtube. Or change your name on your shoebox.

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  7. Or just listen to A. She's the expert on where to hide zillions of TB of pictures on the web. :)

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  8. Gary: I'm working on the memory to, but uh.. ? What was I going to say?
    Oh damn. And where are my keys, I had them a moment ago...

    Max. 1: 5$ a year! But I'm a cheapskate, and I only have english money. It's metric money, like your American dollars, but I don't think google would accept it, they might think it was home-made money.
    Max 2: 6% of what? the freebie space or the 20 Gb?
    I tend not to bother resizing the image, so clicking gets you the big pic.... that probably wastes a lot of space. But movies? I never ever have posted one that's not hosted by Youtube or a youtube wannabee.
    If I change the name on my shoebox some other kid will wear my sneakers.
    Max 3: A is hiding TB on the web? That makes her worse than badgers, and they give TB to cows. Hiding TB on the web will lead to tubercular spiders coughing blood and dying of consumption. It's inhumane.

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  9. Never thought of creating another username to add to authors, hmmmm. nice one!

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  10. Glad to have found your blog.

    I have two blogs and have tried various ways of solving the storage problem and have found different kinds of challenges with each one.

    The reason I have been reluctant to pay for extra space is that it seems we don't buy it but rent it - which means our pictures will disappear if ever we stop paying. (Am I right? I would be glad not to be!) However, with one of my blogs, I did begin the process of buying more space when . . . something went wrong with the pages loading . . . and I suddenly had more space even thought the payment hadn't gone through . . . but the pictures in two of my Picassa albums had vanished . . . even though the pictures that were in them are still visible on my blog . . . and I am thoroughly confused!

    In the last couple of days, I finally worked out how to re-size using pixels instead of MB/KB and thought that would solve the problem but in one explanation of free storage it says images with longest edge no more than 2048 pixels can be stored for free. In another it says 800. Experimenting coincided with Google/Blogger hitting problems with its own storage arrangements . . . and there, I think, is the crux of the issue. Google is amalgamating all sorts of things piecemeal - Picassa, Google+, Blogger, Drive - and it's tripping over itself. I expect/ guess they'll eventually rationalise. Then, it will be clearer how to solve our storage / pictures for blogs problems. (Even if we don't like the solution!)

    Meanwhile . . . something you might know . . . For a while I thought it might work to upload my pictures to places other than Picassa and use the URLs for the blogs. Apart from the quality not being so good (can't enlarge properly to see detail) after a while, I was concerned that if I did this much, the search bots might think I was scraping the material, even though it is all my own.

    What do you think?

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