It does happen. I saw it just this past week while private tutoring someone on Picasa. I double-clicked on a thumbnail photo of a little girl, and what appeared was a photo of a boat! What the …. ?!#%*!
This can be a scary experience if you don’t know what’s going on. It appears that your pictures are missing or garbled. All that has actually happened is that Picasa’s listings of them have become corrupted. Your photos are fine. It’s like you’re trying to read a book with someone else’s eyeglasses. Nothing looks right, but the book is fine.
What I referred to above as Picasa’s ‘listings’ is actually a database, and it needs to be rebuilt. The built in method to accomplish this is to hold down the Alt, Ctrl, and Shift key as you launch Picasa. Make sure to launch Picasa from the start menu however, not from a desktop icon.
So, hold down Alt, Ctrl and Shift; Click Start and Picasa 3. Once you see the Picasa 3 logo, you can let go of Alt Ctrl Shift. It will take a minute, but you should eventually see:
Click Yes, and it will rebuild it’s internal database. When it’s done, your pictures should all be back to normal.
If you don’t want to trust this built in procedure and you’d rather do it yourself, let me tell you how. The database is actually a set of folders found within a folder called Picasa2. Yes, even in Picasa3, the database is found in a folder called Picasa2. That folder is located along with other program settings in your Windows user settings folder. Specifically, in Windows Vista it is:
C:UsersChrisAppDataLocalGooglePicasa2
In XP it is:
22 Responses to “Picasa Tip: When your pictures get “All Messed UP””
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Thanks! A move of folders of images to other folders using the explorer led to duplicate folders. The control-alt-shift procedure appears to have removed the “ghost” duplicate folders on a Windows 8.0 machine. Odd that, as far as I can tell, Google makes no mention of this procedure. Maybe the remove, delete databases, and reinstall is seen by Google as more likely to work in more situations and leaves that as the default advice.
I have this same “messed up” problem. Have rebuilt the database the way Picasa says to do it about ten to twelve times. Photos are on external drive. Still messing up. Picasa is SLOWLY, VERY SLOWLY scanning my external hard drive to bring pictures back into Picasa. I have no idea when I will know that all the photos are in Picasa again, but don’t want to do anything much now to rock the boat or lose any photos. Should I use this method above or is there a later answer, more current since this is dated 2009?
That is still the answer. I’m wondering about the part though. The only other thing that could be going on is corrupt files. Video files can cause problems. If there are any video files on your external drive, I would try moving them to their own folder and not scanning them with Picasa and see if that makes a difference.
I never put any video files into my computer, but my son did this summer when home from overseas. I thought I had deleted them all, but will go check the drive to see if any are still there and delete them. He has them still on his own camera and own computer so it’s OK to delete. I had read where they can cause the trouble and as I said, thought I had deleted them. Will check right now….IF I can get into Picasa. The past hour I have not been able to even open it on my computer. I did a restart, so hopefully I can. Thank you so very, very much.
There is no video anywhere on my C drive or on the external drive or anywhere I can find on the whole computer. I use Windows 7 and typed video into search box even and nothing same up except sample videos which I promptly deleted.
I have been using Picasa for years and I love it, however one day a few months ago it just went haywire. Almost all of my photos were cropped even though I had not cropped them, albums and folders were empty, photos were in albums they didn’t belong in etc. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling numerous times including removing the database but nothing helps. Yesterday I ran across this post and tried your Alt, Ctrl and Shift method but that didn’t work either. When I start Picasa back up it reloads all of the photos but when it is done most of the photos are gone. The albums and folders that do still have photos have a small percentage of the photos that are supposed to be there, there is one photo that shows up in almost all of the albums that shouldn’t be in any of them, photos are cropped when they shouldn’t be, there are photos that I have never seen before, the faces folder has images that have nothing to do with faces, there was a folder that was dated 1988, one folder is duplicated 17 times with 3 images in it, 2 of which appear to be screen shots that I never made, the 3rd image is a square with nothing but the grey/white ping image background. I am using Vista, Firefox and Picasa 3.9. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Hi Carol,
I just read about your problem in the picasageeks forum about your problem with Picasa. I have had the exact thing happen to me but it has also affected my windows folders too! I’m freaking out to tell you the truth. What did you do to fix your problem?
Thank you so much,
Leslie
https://picasageeks.com/2009/01/picasa-tip-when-your-pictures-get-all-messed-up/
I have been using Picassa for years and I love it, however one day a few months ago it just went haywire. Almost all of my photos were cropped even though I had not cropped them, albums and folders were empty, photos were in albums they didn’t belong in etc. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling numerous times including removing the database but nothing helps. Yesterday I ran across this post and tried your Alt, Ctrl and Shift method but that didn’t work either. When I start Picassa back up it reloads all of the photos but when it is done most of the photos are gone. The albums and folders that do still have photos have a small percentage of the photos that are supposed to be there, there is one photo that shows up in almost all of the albums that shouldn’t be in any of them, photos are cropped when they shouldn’t be, there are photos that I have never seen before, the faces folder has images that have nothing to do with faces, there was a folder that was dated 1988, one folder is duplicated 17 times with 3 images in it, 2 of which appear to be screen shots that I never made, the 3rd image is a square with nothing but the grey/white ping image background. I am using Vista, Firefox and Picassa 3.9. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Great!! thanks for the information it served me well. In my case I had a wild contact in Picasa´s DB that could not be deleted, the only way to correct the situation was to rebuild the database and now everything seems fine!
Greetings from Argentina.
Hi, my photos are all mucked up, not in the right folders, zooming in on faces, I tried the above method but I’m using a Mac, how do I fix this?
Thanks
Sarah
does this method work in windows 7?
Windows version has nothing to do with it. Just Picasa version. It has changed some since this article was written. Here’s the official instructions from Google. Rebuilding database.
If the ctrl-alt-shift method is done, what happens to all the face tagging? I have spent a lot of time getting my ~10,000 pictures or so all tagged with named faces. It appears to be rescanning. How can I get back my name tags?
Thanks,
Scott
Scott,
Great question, I decided to use it for this weeks Picasa Tip:
http://50.22.81.91/~chrisg/2011/01/saving-faces-when-you-re-install-picasa/
I used your three key solution and found that I had to redo a lot of settings. In folder manager for one. The rebuilding of the data base brought in many unwanted folders.
I have found two other “solutions” which work for me. They may not address the real reasons Picasa messes up the links but for a quick fix, here they are.
1. Select the questionable thumbnail and go to File on the menu and then Save a copy. The copy, so far, has always reverted to the correct thumbnail and I delete the messed up one. And rename the new one if necessary.
2. A little more drastic is to go to the menu again and with a folder selected, click Pictures and then click Undo all edits. Usually it is after an edit that the mix up happens. This method has always worked so far but the down side is that it undoes ALL edits in the folder. So if you have a lot of stuff edited, choose another way.
Chris, you are right. It was scary to do it, but I trust you and it is working. Could this also be the problem I had previously when I transferred from the flash drive back to the computer and the files were all over the place? Thank you.
Thank you for this! Recently I decided to reorganize all my photos on my hard drive. So I did… without reading your various advice. Afterwards, my Picasa Albums and Folders were all “horked”. You, I do things like this because I’m such an expert! 🙂
I was just getting ready to email you all for help when I stumbled across this article. My Picasa is now happily grinding away, re-scanning my hard drive and rebuilding itself.
Yay!
In method 2 you forgot to mention that you need to have “View Hidden Folders” chosen to see the folders you have listed for the Picasa2 folder.
Ben,
The actual instructions I give in this article are to rename the database folder. That is the equivalent of deleting it. It’s the Picasa2 folder that you would delete.
How did you know this is the tip I needed? I searched for a way to do this in Picassa help and the only solution there was to uninstall Picassa and then reinstall it. I knew there was a better way! Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Beth
That’s a comprehensive reply. Thank you.
I shall use the first option you gave me of using the 3 keys.
In case I have to make use of the 2nd option, later on, please tell me
how to ” The easiest way to make Picasa rebuild it’s database is to delete the current one”.
Thank you and you are very kind,
ben