Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with picasa

Picasa needs glasses

photodegas — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 07:12:06 -0800

is there a way to make picasa web albums private so that people can see the picture you link for them but can't go and see the full album? right now, the options are "unlisted" which means people can see the picture you send them the link for but they can still hit "view all" and see the whole album or "sign in to view" which means they can't see anything at all is there an in-between?

Picasa Mac client behavior?

plowhand — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 11:24:19 -0800

Picasa for Mac: is there a way to limit the Mac client's initial scan of the entire HD for images, and either restrict it to just scanning designated folders or prevent it from scanning excluded/private folders? When I launch the Picasa Mac client, the first thing it does is scan my HD for ALL images. I'd really like it to just scan my iPhoto folder, as not every photo on my HD is intended to be shared. Ironically, Google is failing me and seems unable to provide an answer to this question.

Lost folders and albums in Picasa 3

yezimary — Mon, 25 May 2009 19:34:20 -0800

I started Picasa 3 today and it immediately started searching my folders for pictures. After this was completed all my albums were no longer there. How can I get them recovered? I started Picasa 3 today and it immediately started searching my folders
for pictures. After this was completed all my albums were no longer there.

I tried to restore the picasa2 and picasa2albums folders located in
C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Local Settings\Application Data
\Google. Picasa2albums has a subfolder, backup, which seems to have backups of the albums. However, copying them manually doesn't work.

Does anyone have a solution for this problem? And any suggestion for the backup plan of Picasa information? I don't want to create albums over and over again.

Iphoto for windows?

mecran01 — Sat, 16 May 2009 13:22:02 -0800

I use Iphoto but my wife has a laptop with windows XP installed. She has been using Picasa, but we both hate it. We import pictures then they disappear. It's really difficult to navigate our existing photos, whereas with Iphoto it's fairly simple, even though hardcore photographers seem to hate it. We just want something that allows her to easily import pictures from her camera or card reader and browse them easily with a chronological sort by roll/album/year etc. It would be super helpful if you could only recommend software that you've used with rank beginners or link to a review of said software package.

It need not be freeware, we just want something that is simple and bulletproof, i.e. something your grandma could use. Also, my wife does not want to put pictures online. She came of age when people didn't share their entire life online with the universe. Thank you, I am worn out from looking.

Alternatives to FlipShare for Managing Video on a PC

muckster — Tue, 05 May 2009 11:04:00 -0800

Can you recommend software for managing Flip videos on a PC? I recently got a Flip MinoHD, but a) the built-in software refuses to work on my system and b) it's a little too simple, anyway.

I'm looking for something that will let me import, file, play, and tag the clips from the camera. Picasa 3 looked promising, but somehow, playback of the H.264 files stutters (according to the forums, this is a widespread problem.) Tagging is important to me, so FlipShare wouldn't do even if it worked.

Is there anything similar to Picasa or Lightroom for short movies that will work with the H.264 files produced by the MinoHD? Thanks much.

Get rid of Picasa floating tab.

signal — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:11:59 -0800

Using picasa 3 to make a movie (as per this). The rendering will take over 1 hour. How to get rid of the useless "Making Movie" tab. It floats on top of any other application, and if I try to close it it asks if I want to abort the movie making process. The right hand side is where most 3d and graphics applications' panels are, so it's very, very annoying to have to constantly shift around the pointless Picasa floating tab.
How to turn this off or, if this is essentially impossible, move it to the left side? Using Vista, if that makes a difference.

Someone uploaded pictures of me (along with them) to Picasa along with my full legal name.

Anonymous — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 08:36:38 -0800

Someone uploaded pictures of me (along with them) to Picasa along with my full legal name. Now a Google image search with my name returns these images as the top 10 hits. I was not told these pictures would leave their camera and computer and migrate to the net.

The owner of the account is not very tech savvy and cannot log back in to Picasa because they forgot their login and secret answers.

After about 20-odd emails back and forth, nothing has been done, these pictures are still up.

What can I do to get them down? I dont want any lawyers involved since this is clearly a case of tech-infamiliarity and nothing malicious.

I'm not in the States. Neither is the Picasa account owner.
Can we get Picasa to take them down? How? Please help.

Google account disappears -- help!

shivohum — Mon, 19 May 2008 19:35:23 -0800

We had a Google account which stored photos in Picasa web albums, and paid for extra storage. One day, the account simply disappeared. We contacted Google. They replied "Because our investigation was inconclusive, we can't provide you with access to this Google Account. ... we take privacy and security of our users very seriously. For this reason, we're unable to reveal any further information about the account you'd like to access." This is Kafka-esque. We can't figure out how to get any more information or help. Any idea what to do?

Putting photos on Picasa from yahoo mail

seekingsimplicity — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:26:05 -0800

When I receive photos in my yahoo email from family and friends, what is the easiest way to download them to picasa? I have picasa on my computer and I also paid $20 to have picasa storage on the internet. It seems very time consuming. Also, is there an easy way to put all my photos that are on my computer to the picasa storage on the internet? Thank you so much.

Where to upload all our party photos?

Brian James — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 08:24:30 -0800

Looking for a photo-sharing website where a closed group of people can all share and upload photos to a given gallery. Bonus points if no registration is required, and if it allows for big photo sizes. I'm looking for a photo sharing website of the kind that would allow me to create a gallery of photos, share this gallery with a closed group of people, and also allow members of this closed group to upload photos to the gallery, so there is one central place for everyone's photos.

I understand that there are a billion photo sharing sites out there that allow this amongst registered users. I would ideally like to do this without a registration step, in some slick, Grandma-friendly interface. Perhaps access can be controlled by a unique URL?

(If Picasa can do this, I have failed to figure out how.)

Keeping tags, etc. when uploading to photos Flickr?

Smarson — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 10:53:20 -0800

How do I upload my digital photos to Flickr and make sure the metadata stays intact? Currently I use Picasa as the organizing software for all my pictures. I was using the picasa2flickr plugin to mass upload my edited photos (keywords, captions, etc.), but the most recent Picasa release has borked it.

I've discovered that using the Flickr Uploadr (2.5, not 3.0) allows me to upload photos and will keep the metadata intact as long as I don't use uploadr to resize the files since that strips the IPTC/EXIF data. Not wanting to upload 50 to 100 giant sized images at a time, I've taken to resizing photos in Picasa, putting them in a seperate folder, and then dropping them into the Uploadr. Only problem there is that Picasa doesn't have a straight forward resizing tool (that I've found) short of the 'Export' function which likes to create a lot of folders.

Long story short, this seems like so much extra work for something that should be pretty straight forward.

Question 1: Other than Picasa, is there a photo managing software that will allow me to add metadata (tags, captions, etc.) and make it easy for me to do batch uploads to Flickr (I'm not afraid to spend money on this solution)?

Question 2: The picasa2flickr creator suggests rolling back form Picasa (build 37.27) to Picasa (buid 37.23) in order to keep the plugin's functionality. If I do this, do I risk corrupting/losing any data/images that have been edited with the 37.27 build? I know I'd need to back up the originals of edited photos that Picasa keeps squirreled away.

Full disclosure: I'm barely an armature photographer with a Flickr pro account. The only edits I make are titles, keywords/tags, and captions with the occasional red-eye reduction and crop.

How portable is tagging info written into the picture files?

canine epigram — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 11:46:18 -0800

I'm currently using Photoshop Elements to organize my pictures, and have spent some time going through and tagging them. There's the option to write the tag information to the individual files via XML, and I have some questions. I'm a newbie to Elements. I'm wondering how much bigger the files might get if I selected the option to write the info via XML - it seems like in the abstract, it'd be a good way to preserve all the tagging I've done.

I'm also wondering if that tag information is accessible using other picture management software, such as Picasa - I'm thinking longterm, if ended up migrating to another photography software product, would all my effort be for naught?

Mounting Google Picasa Account in Leopard

davidstith — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 07:32:08 -0800

Looking to mount my Google Picasa account in Leopard. Has anyone attempted this? I have MacFuse but have yet to find a solution to map it all together.

Google vs. Opera

yet.another.boston.question — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 11:43:17 -0800

I cannot get Google products (GoogleEarth and Picasa) to link to Opera (or Firefox or anything) when they need to open up a webpage. Has my using Opera and Firefox somehow confused these pieces of software? A couple of specific examples:
1) help pages in Picasa do not open up (they are web pages).
and
2) In GoogleEarth, links within location postings do not open.

Any ideas?

Where did my Picasa hidden photo information go?

grouse — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 10:41:54 -0800

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.

Picasa Tagging & Download

srt19170 — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 11:31:55 -0800

Two Picasa2 Questions: (1) Is there any way to tell what tags have been attached to a particular photo? (2) Is there any way to download an entire Web album to a particular folder? (The "Save Imported Pictures In" option doesn't seem to work.) I did various searches trying to turn up the answers to these questions with no luck; my apologies if I'm an idiot and overlooked the answer.

Help me organize my pictures. Without Picasa.

niles — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 14:30:46 -0800

I like Picasa, but I really like open source. Like digiKam, only on Windows. Can you help? Ok, so now that I have a decent camera, I am once again putting my "I'm not OCD but I am on TV" organizational skills to use with my pictures. I have used Picasa in the past, and it's great. Two problems: They seem to have removed tagging (yeah, I know you can do it online), and it's closed source. I really don't like the whole "locked in" thing, so I'd like a (free) open source program. As far as I can tell, digiKam is what I want, but it only works on KDE, and it's not worth me setting up a linux box.

Here's what I'm looking for:

Can import pictures directly from a memory card and/or folder
I can create albums containing any picture (rather like iTunes playlists)
Can organize/display pictures by date
Supports tagging
Picasa isn't supposed to be used commercially. Yeah, no one will ever know, but I could be doing some commercial / freelance stuff. Commercial usage would be nice.

Is there anything like this that is FOSS, and runs on Windows (xp)?

I realize that I have just about described Picasa, but I don't want to completely sell my soul to teh Google. Not yet, at least.

Help me be a better photo editor.

ColdChef — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 13:02:21 -0800

Help me to be a better photo editor. I can't throw anything away! In the past year I have taken over 10,000 digital pictures. Mostly family stuff, but some some "artsy" pics as well. When I can get my little girls to sit still for a second, I'll shoot 100 pictures at a time, maybe changing poses four or five times. Out of that, I'll get maybe a dozen pretty good pictures and one or two "keepers" that are worth printing and framing. I'll upload the 12 or so to Flickr and maybe email the "keepers" to family and friends worldwide.

Here's the thing, though. I can't bring myself to dump the 90% of "Eh." pictures. I KNOW they're not worth keeping. I KNOW that there's nothing to them. I took three years of photography in college and I KNOW the difference between good and bad pictures. But there they sit, junking up my photo program, doing nothing for me.

Still. I. Just. Can't.

Part of me thinks it's because that (when I used to shoot film) I loved looking at contact sheets and picking out the "gems". I loved the process of seeing a great photo coming out of the mound of "not-so-goods." Also, my great-grandfather was a photographer of some reknown and I treasure looking at all of his negatives, good and bad, and seeing his process. I suppose it's egotistical to think that three generations down the line someone would want to see all 1,100 pictures of my baby's toes that I've taken, but I still can't get over that psychological stumbling block. Plus, (and this, I acknowlege is the lamest thing) the pictures are, you know, of my beautiful little girls. How do you throw away pictures of your little girl, even if there's snot crust on her nose and her eyes are half closed?

The obvious solution is to archive everything I shoot and then keep only the cream of the crop in my computer, but that's exactly what I can't bring myself to do.

Am I a crazy person? Is there some secret to letting go?

I have a Canon Rebel XT and I use iPhoto on my Mac and Picasa on my work computer. I also have a flickr account where I upload some of my favorite pictures.

moving iphotos to picasa--metadata transfer?

craniac — Sun, 09 Jul 2006 18:55:46 -0800

I am moving almost 7 gb of Iphoto pictures to my wife's pc laptop/picasa. If I drag my photos library to my ipod (which has been formatted to work on her pc as well) will any metadata, such as the date the picture was taken, be transferred? Or should I just rename all of my photos to the date they were taken before doing the transfer? Has anyone else done this? I don't have a dvd burner on either machine.

Digal Photography Workflow

rongorongo — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 06:34:07 -0800

What is your workflow for getting pictures off a digital camera, filed and to the state you want them in? Can you improve on mine? I ask because - despite having some pretty good tools at my disposal - I still find the process long and convoluted; there must be a better way. I want to get the pictures onto my PC, name and file them appropriately, edit at least some of them and send them for online printing/display. I'm using XP but would be interested in Mac solutions.

Here is what I do at the moment:
1. Get the pictures off the camera with Windows own photo transfer system. I have a folder structure something like "2006/Summer Holiday" – the year and then the occasion. The photos in a batch usually don’t match an occasion - for example I may have taken some more pictures since I got back from the holiday - oh well. The photos are shifted over as jpegs.
2. Examine the folder contents with the view type set to "Filmstrip". At this stage I throw out any that look like obvious duds and give all the rest of them a name like "red_sunset.jpg" – and orient stuff the way I want it.
3. Open all the photos I am considering keeping with Photoshop (CS) to check detail and make edits. I guess I could have used this prior to this point but I find the app a little slow at the initial stages. Make any edits I require and (usually) over-write as a jpeg with a high quality setting [10] (I have heard that re-saving as a jpeg reduces quality but I guess I will live with that - actually the post edit file sizes are usually bigger than the originals).
4. Upload the images I want to print to the website (I am in the UK and use Photobox)
5. Maybe upload some images to Flickr for sharing.

Only Flickr lets me classify the images by multiple tags and I would really like to have something which would let me do this for my local file system. I have experimented with Picasa - I like many of its features but am a bit confused by its filing and editing systems. It also seems to be pushing me in the direction of its home grown sharing and printing services which I would rather not use.

Picasa over a network. Possible?

jonathanbell — Wed, 24 May 2006 13:31:31 -0800

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.

Picasa or Flickr? Why?

keswick — Sun, 24 Oct 2004 16:16:57 -0800

Picasa or Flickr? Why?

Better Than Picasa?

Aaorn — Fri, 16 Jul 2004 08:20:09 -0800

I downloaded Picasa at the urging of Google's homepage today, but found it profoundly unuseful. What's a better photo-organizing program? Picasa was beautifully fast, even on my crawly 400mhz laptop, but the UI was a real pain. If I'm viewing a photo, I want to be able to add keywords/description on that screen, not by going through a separate dialog. Likewise, keywords I've already added should be immediately visible next to the picture (or as a tooltip), not require me to press another button. Searching should be always-available and fast.

It would be nice if the application used native widgets instead of overly-pretty rounded corners everywhere, but I realize that may be a lost cause these days.

Does a solid-enough program for Windows XP exist, or should I continue to just use the filesystem?