Where did my Picasa hidden photo information go?

March 27, 2007 10:41 AM

I restored my Picasa data from a backup after a crash. Now none of the previously hidden photos are still hidden. Can I recover this automatically somehow?

I had a hard drive crash and had to restore my Picasa 2.2.0 (Build 28.20.0) setup from backup. I used Windows backup, not the Picasa backup, and just restored the following folders:

%UserProfile%\My Documents\My Pictures
%UserProfile%\Local Settings\Application Data\Google
%ProgramFiles%\Picasa2

Certain information (crops, captions, stars) is still attached to my photo library. However, all of my hidden photos have been unhidden. Is there a way to restore my data keeping the hidden photos hidden? I would hate to go through them one-by-one again.

Related: I like to take a lot of pictures, including multiple exposures of the same object. Obviously I don't want these all showing up in my album, so in the past I've picked the best and hidden the rest. So there's many hidden photos involved. A friend of mine uses the star feature instead (whereas I've used it just for my about 10 or so favorite photos ever), only exporting photos that are starred.

Do you have a suggestion as to which of these methods is better? Obviously stars seem to be a bit more resilient to backup and restore.

I previously asked these questions here and here. I didn't get many responses, so I'm hoping against hope that AskMe will come to the rescue.

posted by grouse to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Is there a Google or Picasa folder in All Users/Application Data?

How about the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google key in the registry? It contains keys called Photos and Picasa. These keys are empty for me because I uninstalled Picasa a while ago, but it seems plausible that Picasa could store user data there. I've never used Windows backup, does it allow you to restore registry keys?
posted by Aloysius Bear at 1:28 PM on March 27, 2007

Is there a Google or Picasa folder in All Users/Application Data?

Good suggestion, but no.

As for your other suggestion, the registry data is in my backed-up NTUSER.DAT. I will try to restore the data and see if it works this time.
posted by grouse at 2:29 PM on March 27, 2007

That was a good idea, Aloysius Bear, but it didn't work. Thanks anyway.
posted by grouse at 3:11 PM on March 27, 2007

I installed Picasa and used Microsoft's Process Monitor to watch what it was doing (registry and file activity) as I hid and unhid a photo.

As far as I can tell, it doesn't write to any registry keys or any files when you hide or unhide the photo. Therefore it must be storing this information when it closes (or on some periodic timer, perhaps).

By contrast, starring a photo results in lots of hard drive activity. The important bit here is the write to starlist.txt in Picasa's Local Settings folder. This file is simply a text list of photo paths which are starred. I had hoped that hiding/unhiding a photo would work by similar means, but apparently not.

Picasa performs hundreds of thousands of registry and file operations when you close it. Filtering this down, I couldn't find a single one that was both relevant to hiding photos, and didn't involve the user's local settings folder. This suggests to me that it is storing the photos' hidden/unhidden status somewhere in Local Settings — probably in the 'db2' subfolder, where wordhash.dat, albums.db, thumbs.db and thumbs2.db are all likely candidates. Therefore the data is probably there somewhere, but not necessarily accessible.

Perhaps Picasa is storing the hidden status by listing the paths of photos that are hidden (like starlist.txt), and something about the path is different on your restored machine. For example, the photo C:/a.jpg could be marked as hidden somewhere in one of the DB files, and you could be restoring to D:/. Or more likely, the user name of your old setup is different from the new setup (so a photo stored in C:/Docs & Sets/grouse/a.jpg is now located in C:/Docs & Sets/grouse2/a.jpg. I thought this theory might be some use, but unfortunately the evidence in your question contradicts it, as the star status is definitely stored by path, and your stars have all restored OK.

So basically, the conclusion to this epic comment is that I haven't a clue what to do to get your hidden statuses back (sorry).
posted by Aloysius Bear at 4:10 PM on March 27, 2007

For my related question, the new-ish "Albums" feature seems to work best.
posted by grouse at 9:36 AM on May 20, 2007