Method 5, Extra Credit

Whenever I write and add photos to my art blog at home, Blogger tracks the amount uploaded and has a posted limit. I have noticed some artists using Flickr to upload photos instead of Blogger’s Picasa and wondered how to do that. Also, what happens when you reach Blogger’s photo limit? Do you stop uploading photos all together? Or create a new blog when you run out of space? Or must you limit the number of pictures or upload directly to Flickr? Or switch to a blog provider that allows unlimited space?

Exploring Picasa for extra credit on Method 5, I created an account for my art blog and was dumbfounded--seeing duplicates, even triplicates, of photos previously uploaded. Remembering many frustrating weekends when Blogger would lose both my post and photos, I would begin the process all over again. Is that why Picasa had extra copies? Because Blogger lost them but Picasa didn’t? Why couldn’t one of them have alerted me about those duplicates? Or tell me I could retrieve them through Picasa? No wonder I seemed to be running up my photo size limit in Blogger. Not only that, but when I changed my mind and deleted some photos from my blog, there they were--still in Picasa.

Guess this means that once you upload something, it is really out there—cloud computing!—and will continue to be out there until you personally delete it. Since Picasa saved them each time, I conclude only Blogger lost them. This is a big lesson.

The coolest thing about Method 5 exercise was posting to my library blog from Flickr! I had never tried that before. All you need to do is just set up the link in Flickr, compose and edit your post in Word, go to any of your individual photos in Flickr, click on “blog” above the photo, copy and paste from Word in the Flickr space it delivers up, and—zip!—the blog post appears! The only downside was not being able to add blog tags or do further editing.

Personally, I am not impressed with my first view of Picasa. But, I learned some very interesting things, including how to save time on the weekends.