The best way to configure Picasa options and make Picasa work fast and smooth

Picasa is pretty fast and easy to use once installed. There are some settings however that will improve your Picasa experience greatly. Picasa has bundled all the settings in one place called Picasa Options. In this article I am explaining my own settings for Picasa Options. Read on to discover how you can improve your Picasa experience with a few clicks of the mouse.

Access Picasa configuration parameters

All the configuration parameters for Picasa are found on the Picasa Options screen. This screen controls all Picasa behavior on your computer. The change you make here will influence your Picasa experience greatly.

How to get to the Picasa Options screen?

Click on Tools menu on to top tool bar and then choose the Options menu item.

This will bring up the Options window that has 8 tabs:
General, E-mail, File Types, Slideshow, Printing, Network, Google+ Photos and Name Tags.

The Picasa Options window has several tabs.

Let’s take each tab on its own and I’ll explain the best settings for you.

The Picasa Options General Tab

These are the only things that I have checked on the General Tab. Everything else is unchecked.

User Interface check: Show Tooltips.
Files check the following:

• Detect duplicates while importing
• Delete from disk without confirmation (when you select a picture and hit the Delete key, it will delete the picture from your computer)
• Remove from album without confirmation (when you select an Album and a picture within that album and hit the Delete key, it will remove the picture from your album but not from your computer.)

Automatic updates: Update automatically
Languages: System Default
Save imported pictures in: My Pictures\00-TRANSFER\ (this is the location where your date folder will be created when transferring pictures from your camera).

Picasa Options E-mail tab

E-mail program: Use my Google account
Size for multiple pictures: 1600 pixels
Size for single pictures: Same as multiple (1600 pixels)
Send movies as: First frame ( I don’t send movies via email. If you do, check the Full Movie instead).

Picasa Options File types tab

I have all the file types checked. This means that Picasa is my default viewer for all these file types. This is fine with me.

Picasa Options Slideshow tab

I don’t have anything checked here. I used to have a music .mp3 file selected to start when I start the slideshow in Picasa, but I turned that off…it was annoying.

Picasa Options Printing tab

I have the default settings here because I don’t really print digital pictures from my computer. I use services like Costco or Fotki.com.

Picasa options Network tab

I have checked Automatically detect network settings. This is the default settings so I don’t think you have to do anything here.

Picasa Options Google+ Photos tab

I don’t care about Google+ for now so I left the default settings on which is pretty much having only Include with photo uploads checked under Name Tags.

Picasa Options Name Tags tab

I have unchecked everything here because I don’t like using Face Detection since it slows down Picasa quite a bit.

If you want to turn Face Detection on check the Enable face detection and also check Store name tags in photo so the names become keywords in the IPTC keywords field.

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