Picasa - Managing Blogger Pictures

Managing images in Blogger environment seems not convenient at all. It is possible to upload a picture directly to a post, scale and position it, but the sad part comes when you delete an image from the blog - because it is not really deleted from its storage. Trying to find better pictures for a post occasionally makes one upload some different variants of the same picture and all those raw variants are going to stay stored, taking valuable place which is 1GB max for free. The good part is that the default storage for Blogger images is actually Picasa.

One who has a Blogger account already has a Picasa account - you can login to it from Picasaweb with your Google user name and password as usual and there is no need to install Picasa on the home computer. For Blogger images Picasa has corresponding albums created - named the same as the blog, marked with the Blogger and Unlisted icons.

1. The first inconvenience for image managing is that all of them are stored in the same blog album as bulk;
2. The second is that addresses (URL) assigned by Blogger to the images directly uploaded to a post are different from their addresses you can see in Picasa.

So the best approach I can see to manage images for Blogger would be:

1. to upload them directly to Picasa, so they can be easily managed in the Picasa environment;
2. It's possible to assign tags to pictures in order to keep them organized, but I find it more convenient to group them in different albums (PostIcons, for instance, to keep all icons for post/topic types), not just in the default blog albums
3. as a consequence of mentioned above use only direct link from Picasa to put a picture into a post.

Since Picasa in this case is used as an ordinary image hosting any other image hosts can be considered for that purpose. However advantage of Picasa is that it is under the same Google's roof as Blogger itself and that's supposed to give it more reliability against others.