Picasa over a network. Possible?

May 24, 2006 1:31 PM

Picasa 2: a question about how to share pictures over a network.

My photos are kept on a folder on my desktop computer. A copy of Picasa 2 scans this folder and is used to sort and upload, etc. My question is whether I can get the same functionality from my new laptop over a wireless network. Having installed Picasa on the laptop, can I set it to scan the photos folder over the network so all the favourite images, sets, etc., are mirrored and we can upload from around the house? Picasa's 'import' function doesn't seem to offer many options; supporting only images and not folders.

posted by jonathanbell to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Do you want to access the files via network share, or keep duplicate/backup copies of the files on the different computers?

If you mount a shared folder as a drive you will be able to set picasa to moniter that drive, as well as the local My Documents/My Pictures folder. You might get conflicts depending on where picasa stores it's data, but you'll have to try and see what you get.

Otherwise, if you want to duplicate the folders, you could use MS Synctoy or Foldershare (also owned by MS now, but WAN friendly).
posted by tiamat at 2:38 PM on May 24, 2006

Ah, mounting folders as drives. This seems to do the trick, at least so far. What I'd like to do is access the files via network share, keeping them in one physical location but allowing two copies of Picasa to access them.

As you say, whether or not Picasa's database is shared or effectively becomes two databases is a whole new matter. So far the laptop copy of Picasa appears to be adopting the folders I set up in Picasa on the desktop machine... fingers crossed.

Many thanks.
posted by jonathanbell at 2:59 PM on May 24, 2006

I can vouch for both the foldershare and "network drive" approaches. Right now my laptop is downloading photos from my sweetheart's laptop in a hotel in Florida.
posted by wzcx at 3:37 PM on May 24, 2006

Picasa stores all of it's information for a folder in a hidden plaintext file called picasa.ini.


Going by that, it should read/write any attributes (favs, filters, tags) to that file and therefore, if you're setting Picasa up to either monitor the mounted drive or the network share, all attributes should be shared. You might run into a conflict if you try to simultaneously write to the file, but I think this is something most modern OS's take care of automagically. I could be wrong, though.
posted by dvdgee at 11:53 PM on May 26, 2006