Picasa is a powerful program that provides lots of ways to customize your experience making it suitable for your specific needs. By learning how to change working parameters for your Picasa installation, you can use Picasa the way you want to. You can not only make Picasa work faster, but you can also learn how to configure it so that Picasa provides greater convenience on the most common tasks. Today’s article will focus on three simple Picasa settings that will help you see your image folders, import your pictures more conveniently and identify your pictures easier.
See your entire folder tree
Picasa used to drive me crazy. When Google purchased Picasa and released it for free, Picasa would only show you a simplified folder view without allowing you to see the actual folder tree on your hard disk. Picasa has changed that and now you can choose to see the simplified folder view or the full folder tree view.
I make sure I set it up so it shows me all my folders. Well, not all my folders on my entire computer, but the entire folder structure for the photo folders I chose to import into Picasa.
Setting Picasa to show the entire folder tree makes it very easy to locate your folders.
You can also use these buttons to only show your folders by date. Pretty useful.
Set the import folder in Picasa
This setting doesn’t speed up Picasa but it makes life a lot easier when using the Import function of Picasa. I want Picasa to import all images from my camera into a specific folder called 00-Transfer. As a side note, I added 00 in front so that Picasa will put this folder first in the folder hierarchy. So, in order to ensure that Picasa always picks this folder when importing my pictures, I have to specify this folder in the Save imported pictures in: section of the General options tab.
Setting the import folder in Picasa is very convenient.
Set the thumbnail caption to something useful
Any visual cues are helpful when searching for pictures, especially if you have lots and lots of pictures as I do. Therefore I like to add whatever information I have to the thumbnail captions. In my case I add the image tags to my pictures. This way I get a quick description of some of my pictures. This is another setting that doesn’t speed up your computer but it provides extra convenience.
In order to set the thumbnail caption go to View --> Thumbnail Caption and choose one of the existing five options: None, File name, Caption, Tags or Resolution. By default Picasa selects None so you can pick something more useful.
Personally I use Tags and Resolution and switch between the two depending on what I am trying to do at that moment.
Picasa allows you to insert useful data in thumbnail caption
Essentials for organizing your digital photos
Over the years I have come to rely on only a few products for managing and backing up my large media collection. These are my essential products and services I have been using for many years to keep things organized and safe. Even though these are affiliate links, I wholeheartedly recommend them.I recommend using Adobe Lightroom Classic CC via the annual Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. Lightroom has excellent photo editing capabilities. Yes, Lightroom has a steeper learning curve as you have to learn to keep your catalogs in sync with your hard drive. However, Adobe Lightroom makes most sense especially when you do lots of image editing.
If you don't like the subscription, you can get also download the last standalone Adobe Lightroom 6 for Mac or Windows (while it is still available). However, the product is no longer maintained by Adobe.
Excellent Lightroom and Picasa alternative. If you're looking for a cheaper and simpler photo manager then ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac or ACDSee Pro for Windows is my preferred solution for organizing your media on your computer. It has a very fast browser, beautiful image editing capabilities and you don't work with catalogs at all.
In addition, make sure you have an inexpensive and reliable external hard drive for backing everything up. It is absolutely essential for backing up your media regularly.
If you're looking for a reliable unlimited cloud backup service, I recommend Backblaze Cloud Backup. I have used Backblaze for my online backup for more than 3 years now. All my files are safe and secure and I have never had any problems with them.
Most people want to just organize their digital pictures and ignore these crucial steps right at the beginning...when they are shooting and transferring their digital pictures. Then they wonder why they can't organize their digital photos! Avoid most people's mistakes and start on the right track!
Start organizing now using detailed, step-by-step instructions and videos:
Personal Coaching (closed)
Private Lessons
Independent Course
Reference book
Basics book
Picasa book
When I export a photo to a file on my desktop or computer, Picasa will send a copy of configurations settings too which I don’t want it to do
Make sure first that your desktop is removed from the Folder Manager in Picasa.
Kenny…if you have Picasa set to watch your export folder, then Picasa will create a picasa.ini file in that folder as well. I think this is what you mean by configuration settings. This is normal. If you don’t want the picasa.ini in the export folder, then make sure you exclude that folder via the Folder Manager tool in Picasa.
My picasa used to save my exported (watermarked) photos in the original import folder, which I liked for convenience. Now it asks me to choose a folder, and doesn’t allow me to save them in the original spot — any ideas on how I can get that default setting back? Thanks
Sue…I hope I am understanding your question correctly. As far as I remember many versions ago Picasa would always prompt you to choose a folder for exporting your photos.
You can still export them in the same folder as the originals. In the export window in the Export Location field choose the parent folder of the original source folder. In the Name of exported folder, Picasa should pick the source folder name by default unless you want to change them.
Hope this makes sense. If not let me know because I am not sure I understood your question exactly.
For reference please read my article about exporting photos with Picasa:
http://www.organizepictures.com/2011/07/picasa-export-pictures