Managing photos better in Google Picasa

Posted on March 12, 2007 at 8:45 am

Make sure to read other posts from the Picasa Tips and Tricks series!

If you’re a fan of Picasa because of it’s ease of use, search capability and great organizational power for your pictures, but you only use it’s basic features, then it’s time to learn some useful tips and tricks that will make your experience even better!

People tend to get confused as to how the images are stored and displayed when using Picasa. Basically, it comes down to two types of objects in Picasa: folders and albums. A folder is the most common element and that’s usually the big list on the left hand side and is based exactly on what you have stored on your computer hard drive. So if you were to delete a photo or move a photo from a folder in Picasa, it would delete that picture or move that picture on your hard drive also. Picasa is just an application that manages pictures by creating a reference to those pictures, but doesn’t actually store your pictures in the program. So if you delete the picture from a FOLDER, it’s deleted off your hard drive! So be careful!

What the folders section looks like:

Albums, on the other hand, are virtual folders that you can create and add photos from various folders and this will not take up any extra space because again Picasa is just using a reference to the photo. However, in albums, if you delete a photo, the original image on your hard drive is untouched. You can even delete the whole album and nothing will happen to your photos because the album is a virtual collection.

So if you want to organize your favorite photos into groups like “Great friend pics” or “Awseome family pics”, go ahead and click in the albums section and click the New Album button.

Then go to your folders section and right click on the pictures that you want to add to the new album and click “Add to Album” and pic the new album name that you just created. You can also select multiple pictures by holding down the Control key and clicking on multiple pictures.

So now you have a virtual album that will allow you to organize pictures from multiple folders into one and you can delete and modify these “pictures” without having to worry about deleting your original files.

More tips later!

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» Filed Under Google Software/Tips