How Big Is Your Photo Collection? Cheap Google Photo Storage Changes the Game
Update (October 2026)
Picasa is gone. Google retired it in 2016 and moved everyone over to Google Photos, which uploads in the background on its own. And on a fiber or fast cable connection, an upload like this one takes hours, not days.
Late last year google drastically reduced the cost of online photo storage. Now you can buy 80 GB for $20 a year. This give you the room to upload every photo you have ever taken. They allow uploads of full resolution JPEG files, but unfortunately, they do not support RAW file formats. While it is not the ultimate backup solution due to the lack of support for the RAW file format (master file format used on high end cameras), it is still a good backup of your photos in full high quality JPEG’s.
The upload process even on the fastest DSL available in my area, is painfully slow. I’ve been uploading 24×7 for the past 5 days. I really don’t have any idea how much longer the uploads are going to take. I have the photos mixed in with the raw photo files that don’t get uploaded, so I have no accurate count on my JPEG files. Picasa does not give me a MB total it is uploading nor an accurate status bar. So it may be days and days and days of uploads yet.
It says I have 35.6GB of stuff on the google server, I am not sure if that includes my 8GB of mail or not. I am on the 80GB plan for $20 a year. There are many other plans that give you as much space as anyone could use.
I have many many videos that I want to upload to youtube type of video hosting services, Those may take a couple of weeks to all upload. I don’t even have a HD camera, with a HD video camera, my files would be many times the size of my current files, it might really get to be a problem to transfer all that HD footage.
Over the next few + years we will be seeing more and more high speed options that increase that upload speed, which will make this type of upload process much easier. In the mean time, we just have to bear with it. Online storage is finally cheap enough for people to back up their lives online and now it is our connections that are the limiting factor.
Once I finally finish this upload project, I will be very happy to have collected every one of my digital photos and put them into one place. I’ve had a digital camera for over 10 years now, so were looking at tens of thousands of images.
Youtube restricts how long of a video you can upload, so I will not be able to upload all my videos there. There is another video service allows longer uploads, I think it is called Viemo, so I maybe uploading some videos over there.
