How often do you post images to Facebook? How about sending them by e-mail to your friends? Or maybe you want to publish pictures on the web. Regardless of your purpose, the ability to select your best pictures and export them in different formats for different purposes is crucial to any digital asset management tool. Picasa provides this functionality as well but has kept things simple which makes the whole process very fast. Combined with an intuitive way of selecting your best pictures, the export facility in Picasa makes it very fast and easy to select and send your best pictures. Read on to learn how to export your pictures with Picasa.
6 video modules - over 30 videos containing step-by-step instructions for Windows or Mac programs like Lightroom, ACDSee, Picasa and Photos.
All my e-Books for free - all my products are included.
Completely self-paced. Learn at your own pace and take as long as you want until you learn how to organize your photos. More info
Select your best pictures
The first step is to select and group your best pictures. With Picasa, you can do this very fast by applying stars to your best pictures and then grouping them into Picasa albums (Read Select and group your best pictures in 2 easy steps with Picasa).
Ask the right questions
Before you start exporting your pictures you need to answer some simple questions. Where do you want to publish your pictures? On Facebook? By e-mail? On your website?
The answers to these question will determine two things: the first is the resolution you need and the second is if you need a watermark on your exported pictures or not.
Most of the times, when publishing pictures online (website, e-mail, etc.) you will not need a resolution larger than 1600 pixels wide. Picasa has figured this out and the export wizard allows you to export the pictures in full resolution or make them much smaller by providing smaller resolutions (480, 800, 1024 and 1600 pixels wide).
For example, when I publish my travel pictures on my travel blog, I always use 800 pixels as my resolution and then I add watermark on them as illustrated below. However, when I publish my family pictures on Fotki to share them with my friends and family, I use 1600 pixels as the resolution. I could do full resolution, but then, when I upload 200 pictures to Fotki at full resolution…well, it will take some time no matter how fast my internet connection is.
If you have answered these questions, then you are ready to export your pictures.
Export my best pictures to a folder
Now I want to export all these pictures to a folder that will contain pictures ready for publishing on the web. The album I have created, “web-London”, has grouped all my best pictures from my trip to London. In Picasa, all I have to do now is to export the entire group to a folder on my hard drive.
I click on the “web-London” album on the left tree in Picasa. Then I select all the pictures with CTRL+A (or the equivalent on the Mac). Now I’m ready to export them. So, I click on the top menu on File/Export Picture to Folder.
Then I choose the name and location of the destination folder (by default Picasa will use the name of the album) then I pick the resolution I want for my pictures and in this case I add a watermark with my website name.
Picasa will do it all for me: it will resize all pictures and will add the watermark and put them all in a folder. Now this is cool!
Exporting pictures in different formats from Picasa is easy. Just choose the destination folder and the resolution and let Picasa do the rest.
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 20% until Feb 15) or ACDSee Pro for Windows (save $20 until Feb 15) is my preferred solution for organizing all my media. It has a very fast browser, great image editing and it's simple to use.
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 best photo editing capabilities even though it comes with a steeper learning curve. 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 5 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
Reference book Basics book Picasa book
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!
When i want to select photos from a Picasa folder to put on Face book, i export the selection to my desktop and post them from there. Then i delete them from the desktop and sometimes? they have disappeared from my Picasa folder too? I love Picasa and have been using it for 10 years, eeek i can’t help wondering how many photos have i deleted from my storage (folders). What am i doing?
Hi Vlad,
Is there a way to export the pictures without losing the original created dates?
I find that if I export then the date corresponds to the export date, which is annoying for people that store and file their pictures according to date… I wish to email smaller versions of the pics but don’t want to send 2010 pictures with a 2016 date on it…
Thanks!
Lili…if you mean the file date the answer is no. Whenever you export a photo it will create a new file and therefore it gets a new date. However, the date inside the EXIF metadata portion of the file will be preserved. However, this date can be seen only if you add a new field in Windows Explorer for example (i.e. Date Picture Taken).
Here’s what I don’t understand: I take a jpg that’s 300 dpi in a 5MG file. I export it keeping size the same but reducing Image Quality so the file size is below 1MG. dpi remains the same at 300, I’m using Original Size; so how can file size be cut to 20% of what it was?
Tommy…great question! The algorithm used by jag expresses the brightness of a chunk of pixels using a lot less data that the uncompressed photo. Remember that a digital image file only contains numbers representing brightness and color. If you can approximate the values based on nearby values you can essentially remove numbers (data) from your image file. The size has nothing to do with compression, it is the way brightness and color are recorded in the file that changes. With jpeg lots of data is inferred and approximated rather than storing the actual value. Here is a good video: https://youtu.be/f2odrCGjOFY
Hi, when I click on export a message error comes up saying unable to write all files do to disk error. disk may be full or read-only. What do I do to be able to export pictures again. I used to be able to do it before. Thanks
Betty…not sure what is going on other than really checking to see if you have enough room on the disk you want to export to. If you’re using a mac you cannot export to your iPhoto library since it is locked…you have to export somewhere else.
After I have done some editing in Picasa and used the “soften” edit I proceed to export. The exported image does not contain the soften effect… why? How do I export and end up with all the effects including the soften effect in the exported image? Any suggestions?
With some effects in Picasa (including softening) you have to press the Apply button and then export and the resulting pictures should have the effect applied. The exported picture should have all the effects you have applied to your photo.
How can we check that were our pictures has exported,in which website please provide me this information as there are some personal pictures of mine which i don’t like to show to others or send them.
Ahash….I hope I am understanding your question correctly. When you export pictures with Picasa you export to your computer and you choose which folder to export to. You might be referring to synching your folders…in that case your pictures will go to your Google Plus account. To check that you click on the Plus link from your Gmail account. Hope this helps.
Nice! Now I know how to insert pictures in Picasa.