The other day, a person contacted my website and they were inquiring about being able to upload images to blogger using Windows Live Writer; they were having a problem.
I knew that Windows Live Writer was compatible with blogger, even the latest version, but there are some nuances to using Windows Live Writer with blogger. Blogger uses Picasa web to store the images that people upload for their blogs. And in order to use that type of storage Windows Live Writer has to create a folder inside Picasa web called 'Windows Live Writer' so when you upload your posts to blogger, and you had images, those images are placed into the Windows Live Writer folder in Picasa web.
The person that I was exchanging communications with was saying that they had checked everything and everything should be fine, but Picasa web was telling them that they were over the limit; that was another issue. In the course of trying to help them though, I found some other articles that were kind of disturbing. I really haven't got a response yet from my question about this to Google, but I'm kind of hoping that they'll get back with me soon.
If you take a look at this information:
http://support.google.com/picasa/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1224181
It indicates that photos of 2048 x 2048 pixels and videos up to 15 minutes and under will not be counted towards your free storage space with Picasa web. So, essentially Google has been saying that as long as your images are under a specific size and your videos are under a specific size were going to give you free media storage for your blog.
But this is where it gets disturbing…
On November 16th of this year, Google posted this notice about spring cleaning…
Here's the link:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/more-spring-cleaning.html
Google storage in Picasa and Drive will be consolidated over the next few months, so users will have five GB of free storage across both services. If you’re paying for storage, your free storage will now be counted towards your total. So if you buy a 100GB plan, it will give you 100GB of total storage instead of adding to what you already had. We believe this approach will make it much easier for users. For both free and paid storage, people at or near their current storage limits will have the same amount of storage after this change.
According to this statement, Google is going to be consolidating Picasa web and Google drive to provide a total of 5 GB of free storage across both services. It indicates that for both free and paid storage 5 GB is going to be your limit [if I'm reading that correctly].
If this is correct, all the people that are using blogger to run their blogs could be looking at a potential nightmare, because where are they going to store all their images. There's lots of people who post very large images, to the limits of what's allowed, to their blog and Google has always allowed those individuals to post images and videos without any kind of concern.
But the way this is worded, it makes me look at not only blogger and the people who use blogger, but also the people there using Windows Live Writer.
Windows Live Writer doesn't work properly unless that folder in Picasa web is there; and if Google is going to change the way that information is stored and accessed here in the next couple of months, it could break Windows Live Writer for blogger.
Another one of the big issues is that if Google does make a change, and Windows Live Writer desktop working, it may be a very long time before it's working again because of the complete lack of attention Microsoft has given the application over the past 3 years. There's been minimal updates the Windows Live Writer over the last 3 years; the application still doesn't have a find and replace function and besides the ribbon delete update, no new functions have been introduced to the application since it was released.
I have contacted Google through their support forums, but I haven't received any official response from Google about how this is going to work, or what effect it might have on Windows Live Writer.
Here's the link:
https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/blogger/ASON7NNzGJE/D0RnKDTYiyUJ
If Google is going to move forward with this limitation on space for its blogs, and they're going to force their users to find a new place to store their images; like image hosting or an another FTP site— this is going to be bad. It's going to be in worse for people using Windows Live Writer because, most likely, it Google makes any changes to Picasa web that affects Windows Live Writer's ability to post articles; there's going be a lot of upset blogger users/authors.
If I have this information wrong, or if I'm interpreting it incorrectly; or if someone has more information that I do on this issue— let me know...
Thank you,
Larry Henry Jr.
LEHSYS.com
...via Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12
yeah i have seen the spring cleaning update of google. it is very frustrated since all the bloggers will need to move for storage options. how ever it is not clearly mentioned what happened to all the users using more than the limit.and also please suggest some image hosting services that fits perfectly for bloggers.
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