A little while back, Google announced new pricing on their paid storage option that can be used for Gmail & Picasa Web Albums. The new pricing means you can get 20GB of storage for only $5/year!
This, in addition to adding Facial Recognition to the desktop version of Picasa, turned out to be the final push for me to start using Picasa. I had looked into in the past, but preferred some of the features in an outdated version of Adobe Photoshop Elements.
Since I have about 45GB of digital photos from the past 10 years, I opted for the 80GB account for $20/year. This allows me to change the settings in Picasa to upload the full resolution images to Picasa Web Albums, thus creating a full backup of all of my photos at their original resolution. If anything should happen to my computer (or my local backup), I can make use of the ‘Download to Picasa’ option in Picasa Web Albums to sync the album to my (repaired/new) machine!
It’s not anywhere near as fast as a local restore would be, but for the price, it’s a quick way to have an offsite backup of my photos. I can replace most of the actual ‘documents’ on my computer. I can’t replace 10 years worth of photos of my family, especially those of my kids growing up.
