3 simple settings for improving your Picasa experience

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

Here are the essential products and services I have come to rely on for many years to keep my media collection organized and safe. Even though these are affiliate links, I wholeheartedly recommend them.

Excellent Lightroom and Picasa alternative. If you need a cheaper and simpler photo manager then ACDSee Photo Studio for Mac (save 60% until Oct 6, 2021) or ACDSee Pro for Windows (new version available) 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.

If you do a lot of image editing like I do, 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. But if you do image editing, Adobe Lightroom is my favorite.

I recommend Backblaze Cloud Backup for affordable & reliable unlimited cloud backup. I have been using Backblaze for backing up all pictures & videos for more than 4 years now. All my invaluable digital memories are safe and secure. This is the best solution especially if you have a large quantity of media files.

Use a reliable & affordable external hard drive for backing up everything on your computer. It is absolutely essential for keeping all your memories backed up and safe.

Start organizing now using detailed, step-by-step instructions and videos:
Personal Coaching (closed) Independent Course Private Lessons
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YOURS FREE! 10 crucial steps most people miss when organizing their digital photos

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!

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