Upload to Google+ from Picasa enables choice of full resolution or smaller for web viewing. If the user uses full resolution and slowely week by week uploads 20 GB of photos, is the storage truly unlimited and how the limits work?
Picasa web had a limit of 1 GB. After change to google+, it is hard to believe that it is unlimited?
Please do not answer with a link to their help file. I am looking for real experience from real users that sucessfully uploaded 20 or more GB of pictures to Google+.
If you upload the original size images, they will be resized to a max resolution of 2048 x 2048 pixels. Images up to (and including) that resolution don't count towards any storage limits.
If you upload images from Picasa, explicitly as full size, then they will count towards your 1 GB storage limit.
But, to answer your question, no, the storage isn't actually unlimited. I bet Google has a lot of storage, but even they don't have unlimited storage.
There seems to be a 5GB limit. When going into G+ settings, one can see how much the user used out of 5GB limit (most likely applies only to full resolution uploads).
It is not clear how videos count and also whether non-full-resoulution photos count towards any limit.
Picasa Web is still available (and is a separate product from Google) and Google has just combined Picasa Web into (just for image hosting purpose) Google+.
The help article on Google answers all your questions http://support.google.com/picasa/answer/1224181?hl=en
If you have Google+ then all photos uploaded from G+ will be resized to 2048px and won't count towards your free storage. But if you upload photos larger than 2048px*2048px from Picasa Web https://picasaweb.google.com/ (if redirected to G+, click on the link in the yellow message box) it won't be resized and will count towards your free storage and when you run out of the free storage, any new images you upload either from G+ or Picasa Web will be resized to 2048px
Read the article for more information.
I won't say that the storage is truly unlimited, if you are a normal user with a normal need for uploading images then it's a kind of unlimited storage. Google will do all it can to provide you as much storage you want to store images but they have some limits too.
No. "unlimited" refers only to pictures of the lower resolution (<2048) and videos less than 15 minutes. If you want to upload/show/store high resolution images there are many better solutions. Flikr, for example, offers 1 Terrabyte of storage for free. 500px offers unlimites (any resolution).
