Picasa Web Albums Don’t Work!
Someone from Google posted at the Google Help Blog wanting to know: “Something Broken in Picasa Web Albums?” That blew my mind. I could not help myself from ranting:
I have been trying to get help for My Picasa Web Albums that stopped working when I paid for my second year in November 2007. I made repeated emails to Google and repeated postings at help groups. NOTHING!!!!
I have had to stop using Picasa Web Albums for my photos and I went back to Flickr. I don’t like it at all that Picasa started making my photographs smaller when I upload or download them, since I am a PAYING customer. I am not a newby – I have been using Flickr for years and Picasa Web Albums since the beginning.
http://barneykin.wordpress.com/2007/11/27/picasa/
http://barneykin.wordpress.com/2007/12/16/picasa-web-albums-changed/
http://barneykin.wordpress.com/2007/12/20/picasa-web-albums-discovery/
http://barneykin.wordpress.com/2007/12/27/goodbye-picasa-web-albums/
http://picasaweb.google.com/barneykin/PicasaWebAlbumsNotWorking
Kerfuffles and Flourishes 
Well – I finally got a “real” response from Picasa which seems to explain the problem. I don’t really understand it, but that does not mean it is not the true explanation.
IMAGE QUALITY
You mentioned that the files you downloaded from Picasa Web Albums were not the same size as the original files that you uploaded. The difference in photo file size can be attributed to any edits that you made within Picasa before you uploaded. After you make edits to your photo, Picasa needs to then re-sample the image to create a new version of the jpeg (apart from the original). This requires Picasa to apply an amount of jpeg compression to your photo. In order to incorporate your photo edits into your uploaded image, the actual size of the uploaded photo is therefore less than the full photo file.
If you made no edits to your photos and uploaded it at the ‘slowest upload; largest size setting,’ you would find the full photo file uploaded.
You can control the jpeg compression level of your files by using the ‘Export’ option before you upload to Picasa Web Albums. For more information on exporting photos, please visit http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=13821
If you’d like to go into more depth about the compression of unsaved edits upon upload, please read this informative post in our user group at http://groups.google.com/group/PicasaGuide/browse_thread/thread/a21c26049b83ebb0/d1ec931bf26518b4?