Thanks to Google Plus, Picasa Gets Unlimited Storage for Photos & Videos, Also Better Tagging
With the launch of Google Plus, there may be some confusion as to how the photos uploaded to the social network (Google+) integrate with Google's online photo-sharing service (Picasa), especially in terms of storage limits.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google has spent three years quietly building Picasa into more than an album host — the service gained face recognition and built-in Google Maps back in September 2009 — and the June 28 launch of the Google+ project gave those assets a job to do. Two days after launch, invite links began spreading through early users' streams, and now Google has confirmed that photos and videos pushed into the social network ride on Picasa infrastructure without hitting its usual storage caps.
The move matters because photo upload volume was always going to be the make-or-break behavior for a social network challenging an incumbent, and Google has answered the storage question by simply deleting it for Google+ users while leaving ordinary Picasa accounts under the old limits.
First-order effects
- Google+ users gain unlimited photo and video storage through the Picasa integration, removing the size ceiling that shaped how much media anyone was willing to push into Google's ecosystem before.
- Picasa's tagging gets sharper at the same time, which feeds directly into the name-tagging and sharing loops Google+ depends on to feel alive.
Second-order effects
- Rivals charging for photo hosting — Flickr's paid tier most visibly — face a competitor giving away effectively infinite storage as a social-network subsidy, forcing them to defend the value of paid plans on features rather than capacity.
- The split treatment creates two classes of Picasa users, pushing non-Google+ account holders toward the social network purely for the storage benefit.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, consumer cloud storage stops being a product customers buy and becomes infrastructure given away to feed a larger network business — a shift with obvious consequences for any provider whose revenue line is 'storage per gigabyte'.
- Tagging at scale also raises the privacy stakes: automatic identification across a growing photo corpus invites scrutiny that Google did not face when Picasa's tools stayed inside personal albums.
The trend: Photo storage is being repositioned from a metered product into free infrastructure that social platforms use to seed their networks.