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Where Do Screenshots Go?

Organizing, Picasa, Special Features Comments Off

Jul 062011

Picasa’s ability to take and instantly save screenshots is one of my favorite features. I use it daily, and I’ve taught many other people about the uses for screen captures, like posting a screenshot to illustrate a question you post in our forum. Recently I’ve received quite a few questions, ‘Where did my screenshot go? I can’t find it anywhere.’

When you press the PrtSc key and Picasa is open, Picasa instantly saves the resulting .bmp file in the Project folder called Screen Captures. Since it is creating and saving this file for you, it doesn’t give you the opportunity to specify a location.

BUT … you only see that ‘Projects’ collection if you’re in Flat Folder view. In Tree view, you need to find a folder named ‘Picasa’ and under that will be ‘Screen Captures.’ All this has been covered in previous articles (just search for ‘Projects’.) But what if you still can’t find your screen captures folder?

Search for ‘capture’

The folder is automatically named ‘Screen Captures’ and the individual files created are named ‘Fullscreen Capture …’ So, a search for ‘capture’ should certainly turn them up.

Click to View

You have to be quick for this one, but by far the easiest way to find a screen capture file is immediately after the capture is taken. You will see the little notification box in the lower right corner. You see this notice any time a picture is found and indexed by Picasa. If you look closely, you’ll see a message that reads, “click to view.’ It means exactly what it says, click there and you will be taken straight to the picture where you can then edit it, email it, upload it, rename it, move it, or anything else you may want to do. The message box disappears after a few seconds, so be quick!

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Backup and Tree View

Organizing, Picasa 2 Responses »

Mar 032010

Picasa allows you to see your list of folders in either Flat view, or Tree View. In Flat view you can sort the folders by Date OR Alphabetically. In Tree View you can’t because it has to show your nested folder structure as you created it. If you understand that, please read on about how it relates to Backup. If not … here are the videos that will show you what I mean by Flat View and Tree View

When you use the Tools / Backup Pictures command, you might be distressed that the option to view in Tree or Flat View isn’t there.

Here’s the trick – get into the view you want *before* clicking on the Backup command. The screen shots below show you the difference in looking at the backup options:

Backup with Flat View selected first	Backup with Tree View selected first
Notice how they are sorted alphabetically so BigBend is just before California Coast	In Tree View, you see that California Coast is on its own, and BigBend is inside the Texas Folder.

Everyone organizes their picture folders differently. Just like any filing system it’s up to you how to file them. Backup is a very important factor in how you organize, so, if you’ve nested folders for backup purposes – this is a very handy tip to be able to see your nested ‘tree’ view in the backup process.

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Need to learn the basics?  Check out our ‘Beginner’s Guide to Picasa’ complete with show-me videos.

Storing Pictures on an External Hard Drive

Organizing, Picasa 14 Responses »

Jun 302009

I’ve written about this before, in Moving Folders to an External Hard Drive. There is also a Geeks on Tour video: (Member Tutorial Video: Move Folders of Pictures to an External Drive)

I wanted to talk about it again because I don’t think people realize just how useful, important and easy it is to store photos on an external hard drive and use them in Picasa. I have over 20,000 pictures that I’ve taken in our RV travels since 2004 and I love being able to browse thru all of them. In Picasa I can search for ‘Odie’ and see photos of our dog throughout all the years. Or I can make an album of photos from Austin, Texas which includes every time we’ve visited (2004, 06, 08 & 09.) Picasa can make this album because it has access to all my photos.

But, those 20,000 photos take up a bit over 50 Gigabytes of hard drive space. On a 200 GB hard drive, that means that my photos would take up 1/4 of all the space available. If that was the main thing on my computer it would be OK, but I need the space for lots of other stuff as well. So, all the pictures more than a couple year’s old are stored on the external hard drive – a Western Digital ‘Passport’ drive which I have designated as drive letter P:

The screen shot below is what it looks like in Picasa. I can’t even tell which folders are on my computer and which are on the Passport when I’m in flat folder view. All 20,000 photos are in the library, they’re searchable, and they’re available for Albums, emailing, uploading, printing etc.

If you switch to Tree Structure view, you can see that the 200612 folder is indeed on the P: drive.

Here’s my system: Whenever I take pictures, I copy them from the camera to the computer into a folder for the current month. All my pictures are in folders by month that they were taken. I keep a year or two on my computer. When I want to move some over to the USB Hard drive, I use Picasa to do it. It moves the whole folder off of my computer and onto the external hard drive. Using Picasa to make the move means that it keeps track of the new location for all the photos, this maintains their placement in any folders.

Works great!

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