Picasa Challenge: Can you Find Pictures from a Vacation 10 Years Ago?

 File Management, Organizing, Picasa  4 Responses »
Jul 092013
 

imageQuick!  Can you use your computer to pull up a slide show of a trip you took 10 years ago?  If you were using digital photography then, you should be able to see them now.  I keep all my past pictures on an external  hard drive.  Picasa can span both the USB hard drive and my computer’s internal C drive to display all the pictures I see in the Library.  When I use Tree View in Picasa and look at my Folders collection, it reports that there are 48,612 pictures total on my computer.  11,460 of those are in the My Pictures folder on my C drive and 35, 291 of those are on S:, which is my external USB hard drive .

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The other day we were chatting with our new friends, Don and Kim from Harvest Hosts.  We love talking about travel with them because we have never met anyone who travels more than they do.  They’ve even traveled by RV in Africa and Asia!  So, when they mentioned river barging in France, we were excited to say, “We did that too!”  To prove it, I sat down at the computer, opened Picasa, and searched for France.  Within seconds the computer was playing a slide show of all our pictures of a River Barge trip to France in 2001.  Kim was impressed, but she asked, “Where’s a picture of the boat in fog with a swan swimming by?  That’s what I remember about barging in France.”  I told her to wait, and after a few more pictures … there was the swan in the fog!

Picture Filing Procedure

Here’s the procedure I follow:

  1. File by Month: After taking pictures with a digital camera, I import them all to my computer, in the My Pictures folder, and a sub-folder by month.
  2. Backup to CD/DVD: Each month or so – lately I’ve been backing up by quarter – I use Picasa’s backup tool to burn DVDs of all pictures taken since the last time I backed up.
  3. Move to USB Drive: After a folder is backed up to disc, it is fair game to be moved from my C drive to the external hard drive.  I do this using Picasa, so it retains the location information in its database.  It’s easy, just right click each folder and choose “Move Folder” – then specify the drive letter and folder location you want, e.g. S:\Old Pictures\.  I usually leave a year or two on my internal hard drive, just because I don’t always have the USB drive plugged in.  But, when it is plugged in, Picasa is working with a library of all 48,000 pictures.

If you are a Geeks on Tour member, you can watch tutorial videos of all of these processes:

  1. Tree Folder Structure
  2. Move Folders of Pictures to an External Drive
  3. Backup Monthly to Disk (CD or DVD)
  4. Searching for Pictures
  5. Picasa Short Course on Organizing your Pictures – 8 Videos

This tip brought to you by Geeks on Tour

Geeks on Tour is a membership website with hundreds of Tutorial Videos on topics of interest to travelers, such as managing digital photos with Picasa, using Smartphones, Route-Planning with Streets and Trips, and sharing your travels with a website using Blogger or with friends on Facebook. You can subscribe to our free e-newsletters, or become a paid member and be able to view all of the videos in the Learning Library.

Moving Folders with Picasa

 Organizing, Picasa  5 Responses »
Oct 282009
 

As you collect more and more digital photos, you will love the USB external hard drives available today.  And, as you keep collecting even more and more again, you’ll love that the USB hard drives are getting bigger and bigger.  But how much of a hassle is it going to be to move your files from the old hard drive to the new one?

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I just love having *all* my pictures available for browsing.  We’ve taken at least 20,000 during our RV travels over the last 6 years.  And, I have several thousand from the years before RVing.  I can browse thru all 28,000 of them from my Picasa Library.  I keep the last couple years on my laptop, and the rest are on my Passport 250 GB USB hard drive.  That drive is getting full.

Did you know that you can buy a 500 GB USB hard drive for under $100?  Amazing.  So, we got one.  And, I wanted to move all the pictures from the 250 to the new 500.  But, I wanted to be sure I didn’t lose all the album designations I had built.  To do that, I needed to use Picasa to make the moves.

If you use Picasa’s ‘Tree View’, you can see what drive stores the photos. (Tutorial Video: Tree Folder Structure)

 

 

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Then you can right click on the folder to be moved and choose ‘Move Folder …’  Choose a folder from the other hard drive and click OK.  Picasa takes care of all the rest.

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Picasa can be like a central control room for pictures on all your drives.  I recorded a tutorial video as I accomplished this move.  It’s a little bit advanced, and it’s a little long (8 minutes.)  But, If you are managing thousands of pictures on multiple drives, I think you’ll like it!

 

This tip brought to you by Geeks on Tour

Geeks on Tour is a membership website with hundreds of Tutorial Videos on topics of interest to travelers, such as managing digital photos with Picasa, Route-Planning with Streets and Trips, and sharing your travels with a website using Blogger or with friends on Facebook. You can subscribe to our free e-newsletters, or become a paid member and be able to view all of the videos in the Learning Library.

Members may want to view the following tutorial videos.  Not a member?  Join now.