This is probably the number one, most basic, most important thing to know about PIcasa and yet, the great majority of Picasa users don’t have a clue! On our GeeksOnTour.com website we have over 90 tutorial videos on using Picasa. I think the one on Folder Manager may be the most important one, so I’m making it free for anyone to watch here:
The other day, I was helping a friend look at some pictures which were sent to her via email. First I showed her how to get them from her email program to her computer’s filing system. I told her to just right-click and download the pictures, then navigate to the C:My Pictures folder and make a new folder there to store them. She told me no, she was now keeping all pictures in the C:OneDrive\Pictures folder because she likes how OneDrive backs everything up to the Cloud.
OK, Fine. The pictures she received in an email are now in her C:OneDrive\Pictures\MountainPics folder.
The best way to view pictures is by using Picasa … DUH! So we opened Picasa, but those new MountainPIcs weren’t there. In fact, none of her recent pictures – stored in the C:OneDrive\Pictures folder were there. This made perfect sense to me because I understand Picasa’s Folder Manager. We just had to tell Picasa about this new location for photos.
- Tools->Folder Manager
- Find the C:OneDrive\Pictures folder and click on it
- Click the blue arrow for “Scan Always”
- OK
Now we see the mountain pics, and all other picturess in the C:OneDrive\Pictures folder.
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9 Responses to “Picasa’s Folder Manager, What Every User Needs to Know”
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The People Manager in Picasa/Gmail is totally screwed up. Contacts continue to sync back and forth that were never in my contact list and there are contacts that I am unable to delete. Totally screwed up.
Hi Jim………………..I’m STILL having issues with my Picasa. (we spoke on the phone a few years ago). My photos go into ‘my pictures’ on my C drive when I plug in my Canon, my iPhone or my iPad….or when I scan something. Then automatically shows up in my Picasa folders on my desktop. Perfect ! ! My problem is – – When I pick and choose which pics I want to send up to my Picasaweb (after editing, of course, the link doesn’t work, so no one but meeeee can see the pictures. I’ve changed the tiny url and still doesn’t work. The URL above is how it reads ‘before’ the tiny url address. Can you pleeeease help me make a link to my Picasaweb that works? I know it sounds simple, but something has happened. I do the photographer and PR for numerous non profit groups here – also my Women’s Club of 275 members and they are becoming less patient that they can’t see the pictures I take each month at our luncheon/meetings. ………………………..from Seabrook down by the Bay (S of Houston).
http://tinyurl.com/CaldwellsPics This one opens perfectly for me. Can you open it? I was thinking it had to say picasaweb.google…….which is fine if it works.
The link you are using (picasaweb.google.com/myphotos) works perfectly to take the user to the web albums of the current account. So, clicking on that link takes me to MY pictures. What you need to do is to go there yourself – maybe even to the particular album you want to link to – and copy the url you see in the address bar there. So, for example here is a link to an album of mine: https://plus.google.com/photos/104655811483131756227/albums/6113958001931748673
Can someone give me the “easy” steps to put info captions on my pictures. I am very new to this and really want to caption them before I forget what & where they were. Thanks. ps: please give me the
1 2 3 steps that I can follow.
Here’s an article on captions: https://picasageeks.com/2009/01/picasa-tip-use-captions/
It’s pretty simple: using Picasa, double click on the photo and they you’ll see gray words below the picture “Make a Caption” just type there.
Here’s another article on Captions: https://picasageeks.com/2011/01/captions-or-text-on-pictures/
When I tranfer my pictures from iPhoto to Picasa is it only transfering my pictures in Events or can I also tranfer the folders and edits that I have done in iPhoto. Do I have to start over?
Kathy
I have intoduced Picasa to many intermediate photograhpers, pros dont like it.
They say when you upload your pictures to picasa people on the internet sees them too. Is that true?
Also Picasa copys the pictures you already have in my pictures so there is two sets of picture one in Picasa and one in My Pictures and slows your computer down and is doesnt resize the picture or read raw files
Please respond at ahzwizerd2@aol.com thanks oz
The question from ozziemorrowjr is a good one. I am an amateur photographer, and geeky kind of person and help a lot of people repair issues based around photo management. I lead towards Picasa for years beca use of both ease of use, and the fact that the engineering team and user base are at Google. Google wants to help people have better tools, and they use their own tools themselves, so it continually gets improved upon.
People who are involved in digital photography have different experiences and different ideas. When you start to point out the negative aspect of OTHER programs, you easily see the advantage of Picasa. You also do NOT have to rely on Cloud Backups with Picasa if you do not want to.
Example: Many Apple users are set up to utilize iPhoto. iPhoto is a very good novice digital photography program. It was designed like other amateur digital photography programs like Photoshop Essentials, Lightbox, Aperture, etc. It creates an independent collection which is completely controlled in a self standing environment. This gets messy, quickly for novice photographers.
Case-in-point: You have a brand new, very fast Macbook Air, with a hard drive capacity of 250GB hard drive. Apple states “You must leave 20% of the hard drive free, for reliable performance.” This means you only have 200GB of space to use on that hard drive for EVERYTHING (photos, documents, movies, smart phone backups, etc.) You have a collection of 100GB of digital photos. If you place them on this hard drive, you have 100GB left to work with in Picasa, as mentioned in PicasaGeeks.com tutorials. If you open iPhoto – it IMMEDIATELY makes a HUGE 100GB second album file, called the iPhoto Library, which in turn requires you to back up 1 file – a 100GB iPhoto Library. Additionally, you JUST filled up the entire usable hard drive space with both your 100GB of photos and the duplicate iPhoto Library.
Additionally, iPhoto has arguably has better RAW image compatibility than Picasa, but not as good as Photoshop, Aperture or Lightroom
So when speaking to photographers, it is important to understand technical aspects like this, and what is important to them. Personally, I don’t need to manipulate RAW, so I am still considered an amateur.