If you use Picasa, the desktop based photograph management and uploading application from Google, you need to be aware that Picasa can lose images and folders from time to time. If you notice your pictures going missing in Picasa, first off, Don’t Panic!

Before We Continue – an Update

Google is dropping support for Picasa. You can keep using it, but if it goes wrong there’s nothing you can do. So here’s some options [taken from one of my replies in the comments below].

1. You could keep using Picasa until it stops working … Not ideal but it will work for a while.
   
2. Upload all your pictures to Flickr. Flickr online offers all the search, tagging and organizing into albums that Picasa does. And I think the new Flickr uploader works a bit like Dropbox, so you can create a basic folder structure on your computer to upload to Flickr. I say ‘I think’ because I haven’t tried the new uploader. I still use Flickr as one of my photograph backup sites (Dropbox is the other) but, see option 3. below
   
3. Adobe Lightroom. $9 per month (last checked October 2016), this has an in-built upload to Flickr. It allows you to tag, geotag, name people, add titles, descriptions, rate images and organize them into endless virtual albums, and export the pictures in lost of formats. It also includes a very comprehensive, non-destructive picture editor. Unfortunately it has a fairly steep learning curve. I love it and it handles my 25,000+ personal images with ease, and also some 10,000+ images I hold for a customer for whom I produce a print magazine. With Lightroom I import the images from the camera into a dated folder (Yearmonth) in Dropbox, and Export them to Flickr once I’ve processed the images. I shoot Raw and Lightroom handles Raw Files, so I no longer keep jpgs. I can produce a jpg whenever I want to any size I want. Since switching to Lightroom I’ve had very little use for Photoshop, except for producing original artwork.

This video will show you how to to log in to your Picasa account. Picasa is an image hosting website provided by Google.1. Go to www.picasaweb.com.2. When it’s done scanning, you’re back at the standard Picasa Import screen. Click Import all. Select a folder to put it in. I made a folder called ‘Old Photos’ for the first one, then, for each subsequent scanned photo, I selected that existing folder from the drop-down list. I scanned 53 old photos in this manner.

Now if you want to try and fix your copy of Picasa – read on…

Check Your Hard Drive

Apowersoft Photo Viewer. If you are eyeing for a Picasa substitute, then Apowersoft Photo Viewer is the one that you can rely on. It is lighter and works faster than Picasa. It only uses little resource which lessens the CPU’s workload. This is a good thing especially for those who have a computer with low configuration.

The good news is that your pictures are probably all okay. Have a look around your hard drive – typically in a windows machine they’ll be in the ‘My Pictures’ folder unless you’ve elected to keep them somewhere else. And of course you keep back-ups?

I recommend Picasa to my customers, so I was rather concerned that pictures appeared to be going missing. Even more so when I started looking online and discovered this is fairly common, and the advice from Google is to uninstall Picasa and then re install it. This is fine if you haven’t been using Picasa’s virtual albums, or making use of Picasa’s rather uncanny face recognition software. In either case you’d need to start again from scratch. So I spent a couple of hours reading endless forums trying to find a solution that wouldn’t lose my albums. I’m not quite so worried about the people recognition, but it would be nice to keep that too.

Firstly my reading reminded me that Picasa unlike a lot of other Photo Organizing software actually deletes a picture or a folder if you ask it to do so. Some Photo Organizers just remove the image from the organizer’s database, leaving the original alone just in case it is needed.

So if your problem has been caused by some over enthusiastic use of the [dakey k=delete] button, go check in your system recycle bin (usually an icon or your desktop), and if you find your missing pictures, use the File Restore facility.

If that’s not your issue, and you can see your pictures in Explorer, but not in Picasa, then before you think about rebuilding your database, there is another check to make.

Check Picasa to make sure you haven’t hidden some folders

Have you accidentally removed the folder or file from the Picasa ‘Scan list’? In Picasa click on File and then select Add folder to Picasa…

Now check the list of folders for any that have a cross beside them. As you can see I don’t bother to get Picasa to look for photographs in some folders on my machine – mainly because I know these areas have duplicates at different sizes.

Rebuilding the Picasa Database without re-installing Picasa

If you haven’t hidden your folders, then it looks like rebuilding your database is going to be required. I found this great tip. There is a ‘secret’ key sequence you can use when starting Picasa that tells it to delete and rebuild the database. To work you must start Picasa from the Windows Start Menu or the Task bar. Hold down the [dakey k=Ctrl] [dakey k=Shift] and [dakey k=Alt] keys simultaneously and keep them held down while you click on the Picasa icon. When the following message appears you can let go of the keys.

Then all you have to do is sit back and wait… and wait… while it finds all your pictures, repopulates your Photo albums, and also (if you have Face recognition turned on) goes through and finds all the faces again. Unfortunately you may need to reconfirm those faces it has trouble recognizing. Picasa took between 1-2 hours to index my 33,000+ images.

Re installing Picasa — DON’T DO IT

Unless you have kept a copy of the install program do not uninstall Picasa. The install program is no longer available.

There’s a Google Support page to tell you how to uninstall and re install Picasa. If you are reasonably technically savvy this blog post tells you what files to save to keep your albums so you can get them back when you re install Picasa.

Backing Up Your Pictures

External drives, SD Cards, DVDs all offer fairly easy ways of making back-ups – depending on how many pictures you have. I also keep copies of my pictures on-line in Flickr – you can have up to 1 terabyte free. Or as Flickr puts it:

[dacallout type=big]1 terabyte = 218,453 16.0 megapixel photos[/dacallout]

That’s quite enough space for most people!

Old Picasa Photos

The important thing is to make a copy. Also, remember to check that your back ups are okay, and make a new copy every now and then. Media deteriorates over time.

So, if your pictures are important make sure they are backed up. Especially before doing anything recommended above.

Do not rely on the likes of Facebook to keep copies of your pictures. Even if you tell Facebook to upload high quality images, it still only keeps fairly small (around 2,000 pixels maximum width or height), and quite highly compressed (low quality) versions. If you want to check how bad it is try uploading a picture showing black text against a red background.

Why Use Picasa Anyway?

I use Picasa for several reasons.

• Picasa lets you scroll through your pictures very quickly
• The Search functionality is very good especially if you tag your images
• Creating albums is very quick
• You can export images at different resolutions – which makes producing smaller images for websites a breeze. I used to use my Nikon Software to run a batch process to do this. Picasa does it much more quickly and easily.
• Automated Collage production. I use these a lot for posters and promotional materials.

I do not use Picasa to edit my pictures. For that I use a combination of Capture NX 2 and a now aging copy of Photoshop, which is all I need for the simple image fixes I perform. And I don’t use Picasa to embed the IPTC data. For that I use Nikon’s ViewNX 2, which also provides Geo-location data.

Many readers have told me they miss Picasa, which Google discontinued years ago. It was great at organizing photos.

One reader writes: “I have tried 22 other apps. The main source of frustration is their concentration on manipulating photos, with no attention at all - or very little - to importing, storing and organizing.” In Picasa, for example, he could save an entire set of photos to a single file. A descriptive name told him all he needed to know.

Fortunately, I found the old Picasa. Search on “archive.org Picasa 27” to find the most stable version. To download it, click on the “Windows Executable” file in the upper right. It posed no security threats when I ran it.

With it, the reader said he was able to bring in all the photos on his system, which he found “very useful.” He’s also enjoying the “export” feature, which I also love. I exported my special photos to their own folder, making them easy to find and email. My relatives adore seeing themselves or loved ones in an occasional blast-from-the-past note. I also love the way Picasa shows so many thumbnail photos at a glance, with the file and folder names from Windows off to one side.

On the downside, the reader notes: “All of 16 years worth of incrementally collected albums are gone. That’s too bad, but recoverable.” In addition, “an import from either the camera or SD card does not work at all, it crashes the app.” (That’s funny, it worked for me.) But “net-net,” he says, “Picasa 2 is very useful to me. Nothing else I have found comes as close to being convenient for opening an existing file, looking at individual photos, deleting them, exporting them, adding captions, and so on. I now have to see if I can in one ‘swell foop’ export all of the photo files, directories and contents to cloud storage.” He concluded: “Your help has been angelic, that is, sent by the gods.” My favorite part of the column is helping readers.

Let’s make a movie

Old Picasa Software

My favorite 10-year-old showed me the movie trailers for a murder mystery she made using Apple’s free iMovie. They were incredible! I had to try it myself.

Apple’s free iMovie for iPhone or iPad gives you 14 templates, which makes creating a trailer as easy as filling out a form and tapping on the photos and videos you want to use. The template adds jazzy music, Ken Burns-style transitions, and titles for each scene. My young friend played the bad guy in her trailer. Her sly expression has a movie-actor quality.

Here’s how you can make a trailer on an iPhone or iPad. Tap to open the iMovie program, then select “create project,” and tap on “Trailer.” Now choose a template. You can tap the play button to see if it’s one you want. I like “Retro,” which is James Bond-y. Then there’s “Fairy Tale,” which reminds me of the movie “The Princess Bride,” and “Coming of Age,” which fits a lot of photo sequences. In fact, these are so good, who needs to make a movie? Just make a trailer.

I chose “Retro” for my nephew’s trailer, which opens up to the “Outline” page. Here I changed the name of the film company from “High Def Productions” to “Aunt Joy Productions” I then typed over the suggested movie title with one of my own, and put in the cast, which in this case was my nephew. Next I tapped the “Storyboard” tab. Here, I could insert photos by clicking blank squares. Each square was labeled with the type of photo or video suggested, such as “action” or “closeup.” Voila, done in 5 minutes!

Deep nostalgia

I just saw my 2-year-old self come alive in a video, as well as my sister at 3 and my dad at 41. It was astonishing, thanks to a new Deep Nostalgia tool from the family tree site, MyHeritage.com.

All I had to do was upload a photo, and they did the rest. Clicking on my dad, I saw his 41-year-old self come alive. Then I clicked on my sister and myself. You’d think it might be creepy, but it wasn’t for me. The site lets you download each animated person to share with others. My sister said: “Daddy looks so young!”

To try it out, I had to enroll in the two-week free trial. After that, it gets expensive, though a basic membership is free. Sign in and click on “my purchases,” then “details” to cancel the Premium version. So far, I’m happy with it. Just by entering the birth and death dates for my dad’s parents, I found out who my great-great-grandparents were, as well as scores of uncles and aunts. In addition, the site allows you to upload your raw DNA data from 23andme or Ancestry.com.

Going faster on the internet

A reader said that after turning the router on and off, his Internet speed rose from less than one megabit per second to around four on average -- better, but hardly great. So he called his Internet Service Provider, which replaced the router with a new state-of-the-art model. “Amazingly,” he said, “where my top internet speed was 5 Mbps, it's now 20 Mbps.” Best of all, the ISP gave him the new one for free. AT&T has always done that for me when things weren’t working, but I never realized how much it affected the speed.

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: On Computers: Picasa an oldie but goodie for photos