So this is the last bit needed to finish the migration to the new laptop. And the one I was most worried about.
I've been using the Windows desktop Picasa application for a number of years to manage my photos and photo albums. I don't use the web-based Picasa because, last I tried, it had some sync and photo ordering problems. Instead, I have an add-on that uploads photos into Flickr, case solved.
So I have a lot of metadata I've added to the many thousands of photos loaded into the system — titles, descriptions, and album groupings. I still had the photo files, but my big terror, given the reading I'd done, was that I'd lose all that metadata. Because if you're going to move Picasa to a new machine, there's this special backup process you're supposed to do to make it all neat and tidy, and without that (so the various web pages I'd found indicated) I was hosed.
The photos, as it turned out, were all stored on an external hard drive from way back, due to space limitations on my last laptop. I still had the hard drive and I was able to tell my machine to treat it as "E:" (which it didn't want to do, since that's the default drive letter assigned to the DVD drive). That's what it was on the old machine, so I wanted to make the conditions identical if possible.
I downloaded and installed Picasa 3.x on my laptop. Annoyingly, the program kicks off a discovery process for photos — that's very helpful for a new installation, but not helpful for my purposes. And unlike some programs, there didn't seem to be a way to shut it off, short of closing the program. Bad design, Google.
But that brief glimpse, going through the menus, had been enough for me to see that while I could point Picasa to the files, there was on that external drive nothing to tell it about the file locations and album data.
So where was it …?
Ah …
I went into the Users/IOwner/AppData/Local/Google folder, and saw that there was both a "Picasa2" and "Picasa2Albums" folder there, newly created and full of all sorts of cryptic-coded files and folders from the brief discovery it had done.
And … hey, there, looking at the old laptop's drive (in its own USB casing), there are similar folders, much larger and complex.
Hmmmmmm …
So I copied them from the old laptop's drive to the new laptop's appropriate folder. Crossed my fingers. Knocked on wood. Prayed to the Google Gods. Fired up Picasa …
And there were all my albums. And my pictures showing in them. And when I clicked on a picture it opened up a larger copy of the picture, so it wasn't just dead thumbnails.
Hu-frelling-zzah.
So this is good news in and of itself. More importantly, it's good news for my New Year resolution to finish labeling all those Italy pictures from last year. Yes, really. While technical difficulties were involved, frankly so was a lot of sloth.
But now I have them ready to rock and roll.
Pompei, here I come!
(Side note: this all is set up with the pictures on that external hard drive on E:. I'd love to move them to the internal hard drive, D:, for a variety of reasons. I'll need to check that out when I can, but I need to be careful, because Google has a tendency to flatten file structures when you move things around in Picasa, and I know from very, very, very painful experience that I have photos with non-unique names from different cameras.)
Look! It's the Winged Victory of Samothrace!
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/7/10990418_6a03bba207_o.jpg
Google+: View post on Google+
I could slap Google for calling the local application, and the web application, both the same thing, Picasa. it's like in Windows there are two things called Explorer. Idiots!
Yeah, that's annoying all right.
Try this next time instead: http://support.google.com/picasa/bin/static.py?hl=en&selected=importing_and_exporting_transfer_photos_to_a_different_computer&page=troubleshooter.cs&ctx=picasahowto_importing_and_exporting_transfer_photos_to_a_different_computer_11068&problem=picasahowto
Thanks. In this particular example, as I recall, I didn’t have a working Picasa installation — I had all the photos backed up through Backblaze, but all the “set” stuff was not backed up from within Picasa. Given I have 53Gb of photo data, I don’t see backing it all up to DVD (let alone CD) any time soon.
I myself haven’t yet done this Picasa backup/restore process. But it looks like it supports external hard drives as an alternate to DVDs. So that’s what I plan to do with my 92GB of photos.
Good point. If it does, that might make it worthwhile. I’d have to jigger things around a bit, since I already keep my Picasa install on my external hard drive. But I’ve been meaning to change that, too.
Dave,
Okay, I now *have* done this: used Picasa’s built-in “Backup” feature. And it does support backing up to a hard drive (or even into a new folder on an existing partially full drive). Note that when you go to restore onto a new computer, the restore function is not in Picasa itself — it’s a separate exe that Picasa puts in with your backup data. Took me a bit to find that.
BTW, In case you are wondering: I stumbled across you and this blog of yours while Googling for how to transfer Picasa to another computer. 🙂
– Ken
I figured it was something of that sort, @Ken. I’ll take a look at this.
I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE you!!!! It worked. 2 months after the hard drive crash I have my albums back. Bless you!
Barb
I am so very glad I could help, Barb!
Dave, you said “I have an add-on that uploads photos into Flickr, case solved.” What Add-on is that? It might be just what I’m looking for. My Picasa (V3.9.147) runs just fine, but I want all the Pictures and the Metadata and the Albums they are in to get sent up to Flickr. There are 10,000 photos and 1,000 Albums so I;m NOT doing them one-by-one manually!