Cleaning Up Picasa

I am still very much in the learning stages regarding Blogger and the whole blogging process. Until this past spring, I had never even considered having a blog of my own, and to be honest, I knew very little about how the blogging process worked. After spending the winter months browsing garden blogs for the first time and enjoying them immensely, I decided to start Robin's Nesting Place. It has been seven months since I began the blog and I have taken thousands of pictures and shared quite a few of them on my blog, as a result, I am reaching my limit on picture storage space.

Starting the blog with Blogger was so easy for this novice and learning to upload my pictures was easy too, albeit quite frustrating at times when not working properly, but as a whole, the basic process is very simple to understand. Since I was interested in simplicity, I didn't concern myself with all of the little Blogger details. It wasn't until my picture storage space reached the seventy percent mark that I actually began to wonder what I would do once the storage space ran out. I didn't really even know how or where my pictures were stored until I did some researching and found the information I was looking for on Beta Blogger for Dummies site:

http://betabloggerfordummies.blogspot.com/2007/03/picasa-web-albums-
for-bloggers.htmllittle


There I discovered that my Blogger pictures are being stored in a Picasa web album. I recently logged on Picasa for the first time and actually looked at my albums. What I found surprised me, so I thought I would inform those of you who also may not have checked out your Picasa album, (I hope I’m not the only one who’s been living in ignorant Blogger bliss). The problem that I discovered was that I have many duplicate photos being stored in Picasa, some were copied as much as three times. I didn't count but there are probably hundreds of duplicates and triplicates. This is using up valuable storage space when my space is at a premium right now.

I started the process of cleaning out my Picasa album, but am a little concerned that I’ll delete those pictures that were actually used on the blog. I have a few questions about this and would greatly appreciate insight if anyone else has had this problem. If there are two pictures of the same thing and I delete one of them will it matter which one is deleted? How does this duplication happen and can I do something to prevent it?

Also, I’d love to know how other Blogger users store their photos and upload them to their blogs. Do most use Picasa or is there another simple way to upload pictures using another host?

Edited to say: It sometimes takes Picasa up to 24 hours to delete pictures so it took a while to see what happened with the duplicates I deleted. Know I know, it does matter which picture you delete. I am missing some from my blog, so now begins the unpleasant task of putting them back. I'm so glad I only did about ten of them until I figured out for sure how it worked.