Picasa is a pretty nice little program for organizing your photos and can’t be beat if you compare the price:performance ratio. However, it’s not perfect and one of the ways it’s lacking is when trying to move your photos to a new location either on the same computer or on a new machine.
The easiest way is to ask Picasa to do a full backup of your photos and then restore that backup in the new location. However, this is not feasible when the photos are mixed in with your general user data or you’ve already transferred everything and just want Picasa to reference it as it did before.
The problem is that Picasa stores its database hidden under “Application Data” for the current user (in accordance to Windows style guides) and keeps only “starred” status and edits in the “picasa.ini” file in the directory alongside the files stored there. Thus, just moving your files won’t move this database. Instead, you need to do the following:
1) Go to C:\Documents and Settings\MyLoginName\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Picasa2Albums and copy everything here to a scratch location on the new machine.
2) In the oddly named directory (an apparently random bunch of letters and numbers), edit all the .pal files and replace everything between <DBID>…</DBID> with the string “null”.
3) If the pathname to your photos has changed, do a global seach & replace to fix the pathnames in this file.
4) Close Picasa on the new machine.
5) Copy the modified .pal files to the oddly named directory at the same path on the new machine (note that the oddly named directly will be a different apparently random bunch of letters and numbers).
6) Start Picasa.
7) All your albums should now appear.
If they don’t, or some don’t, then one or more of the photos referenced in the copied .pal file(s) was not found among the new photos on the new computer. Picasa rejects (and deletes) the entire album if even a single entry cannot be found. This can happen because the files exist at a different pathname, don’t exist at all, or simply have not yet been scanned by Picasa. In the last case, it may just be a matter of marking all relevant folders as “scan always” and then restarting at step #4.
Since I work at Google, I sent an email to the Picasa development team and we talked about some ways of fixing this problem. Hopefully it’ll get better soon.
Super post, Need to mark it on Digg
Joker
I’ve added links to support that.
Thanks a lot! I was afraid to be in big trouble, but this post saved my neck. Thanks man.
Couple of notes for people having trouble with the above directions…
First the “null” is not programming terms for it really needs to be text.. boo, wow, etc… all work fine
Second if you don’t have the “oddly named directory” (I never did) just create any directory under Picasa2Album and put the files there, it seems Picasa scans any randomly named folder (avoid “backup” though).
Third if any of your pathing is wrong the Album won’t show up so if one doesn’t import then double check you pathing to all of your images…
Hope this helps – Michael
Thanks for this post. I know it’s an old one, but I can’t believe it’s still an issue.
I really want to continue using Picasa as my main photo organiser, but the lack of advancement in its synchronisation capabilities are frustrating me. This becomes especially noticeable when using multiple computers, and especially, a phone camera with Android and Google+ instant upload.
I would like that all photos I take on my phone would be instant uploaded and then synchronised back to my computer. I would also like if I create an album using my desktop, that the same album appears on my laptop Picasa instance.
It feels like quite an obvious step to me.
That would be nice and it would provide a way to transfer to a new computer, too. I’m not sure if there is a “send feedback” link in Picasa but there are forums in which you can suggest it.
Is there a way of syncing _some_ albums, but not _all_ albums?
I am using a netbook when traveling, and create albums for a selection of my photos that I upload to PicasaWeb.
Once I get home, I transfer my photos to my desktop to clear the netbook for the next travel. How do I get the newly created album to transfer, but all existing albums on the desktop to remain intact?
Thanks!
The latest version of Picasa do things a bit differently and keep a lot more information in the per-directory “.picasa” (or is that “picasa.ini”…) file. In other words, just transferring all the photos directories is enough to transfer all the album settings — no need to locate and copy the database.
Now, as to your specific problem… I don’t know for sure but you might try just copying the directory (including that info file) and see what happens next time you start Picasa on the destination machine.