One of the best things about Blogger / Blogspot, is that it allows us to store a large number of images. The storage space is shared with Picasa Web. We can say that the limitation on the disk space usage and bandwidth consumed by those images are unlimited. Picasa does have a limited 1 GB disk storage. But the thing about that 1 GB is, storage space is only counted when you upload an image which has more than 2048px width or height. Other images which are lower in pixel size do not count towards your storage limit.
So, you should worry about running storage space only if you are uploading high quality – high resolution images in large numbers. Otherwise, the images uploaded by a normal blogger for blog posts will generally be smaller than 2048 pixels in width as well as height. So, the storage space is unlimited. The bandwidth is also unlimited and is powered by fast servers with a blazing load times.
When, you upload an image to blogger, it is accessible via an HTTP URL like:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--J08yE71VEQ/Uqis2pXHs5I/AAAAAAAAbnM/WWMylqIIXHU/s1600/the-milky-way-mardi-khola-nepal.jpg
The URL is long, but it offers a lot of goodies for us.
See the s1600 part of the URL? s1600 represents the original image width in dimensions. That part can be changed, you can change the s1600 to s500 for example to get the auto re-sized version of the image with 600 as its width. Try this url now and see how the image has been shrunked by Blogger:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--J08yE71VEQ/Uqis2pXHs5I/AAAAAAAAbnM/WWMylqIIXHU/s500/the-milky-way-mardi-khola-nepal.jpg
You can try it with any number that is lower than the image’s original width. This is useful when you are trying to fit an image to the width of your post template or post region.
That is not all, you can also get squared thumbnail images auto-generated from the same uploaded image.
Get Square Thumbnail for Blogger Images
Suppose, you want a squared image with 400 X 400 width and height dimensions. You won’t have to manually download and resize the image. Using the same image URL and changing the s1600 part, you can get cropped up square thumbnails for your posts. Change the s1600 part to s400-c to get a 400 X 400 image. The image url now becomes:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--J08yE71VEQ/Uqis2pXHs5I/AAAAAAAAbnM/WWMylqIIXHU/s400-c/the-milky-way-mardi-khola-nepal.jpg
The new image is automatically cropped up and re-sized by Blogger to form a square.
Automatically Downloading the Images
Another trick that Blogger has in store for us is to generate a link, that will automatically download the image being opened. For that change the s1600 value to something like s1600-d. The URL for the image that we use in the examples above becomes:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--J08yE71VEQ/Uqis2pXHs5I/AAAAAAAAbnM/WWMylqIIXHU/s400-d/the-milky-way-mardi-khola-nepal.jpg
Try opening the above image in your browser. Instead of opening the image, it will begin to download automatically to your computer.
These tricks work for images uploaded from Picasa as well. Try these tricks and get innovative with your image sizes.
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