Managing Your Photo Library

Use these steps to move your filtered photos from your Download directory into your Library:

A. If these photos are part of an event already in your Library, add them to the appropriate Library folder. Here are the instructions from the Picasa on-line help file:

The easiest way to move or rearrange photos in Picasa is to drag and drop them at their desired location. Before you get started, it's important to understand the implications of the move: Moving a photo to a different folder in Picasa also moves the photo on your hard drive. Moving a photo to an album, on the other hand, has no impact on the photo's actual file location on your hard drive.

Follow these steps:

• 1. Select the photos you'd like to move. You can only drag and drop photos from one folder or album at a time.

  2. Click on a selected photo and hold the mouse key down while you drag your photos to their new location. Once your cursor is at the desired location, release the mouse key to drop them in the new folder or album.

If you have a large collection of photos, it may be easier to drag them to the folder list on the left-hand side of your library and drop them once the desired folder or album is highlighted.

B. If these photos are all part of a new event, rename the folder according to the naming guidelines above.

You can also add information about:

• • Date

  • Place taken

  • Detailed description

  • Background music for slideshow and movie presentation modes

To edit a folder's properties, please use the following steps:

• 1. Select the folder you'd like to edit.

  2. Click the Folder menu in Picasa.

  3. Select Edit Description.

  4. Make your edits. Please note the following:

     1. • Date: You can manually choose a date that should be associated with the folder. Alternatively, Picasa can analyze the timestamp of your photos in the folder or album and determine a date for you if you select the 'Automatic Date' checkbox.

  5. Click the OK button.

... and then move the folder to your Library:

• • 1. Right-click the folder you'd like to move in the Folder List.

    2. Select Move folder.

    3. Choose your desired destination (e.g. 2009).

    4. Click OK.

The folder will now appear under the 2009 section in your Library.

C. If these photos are part of a more than one event, then split the folder into several folders first.

Follow these steps:

• 1. Right-click (Windows) the first photo of the group that should be separated to a new folder.

  2. Select Split Folder Here. Notice that all the subsequent pictures in the folder are also selected.

  3. Enter the folder properties.

  4. Click the OK button.

Follow the instructions above to move these folders to your Photo Library.

Preserve Your Library

Once you've processed and moved new folders into your Library, it's a good idea to backup the Library. You can backup on CD or DVD, but I would recommend a few options:

• • Backup to a quality USB Drive. These are becoming more and more reasonably priced and are convenient and portable.

  • Backup to another computer. If you have multiple computers at home, you can use the extra space on one of the machines to store a copy of your Library

  • Take a copy off-site from time to time, or use an on-line backup service like PicasaWeb or Mozy.com

It's important to backup from Picasa in order to preserve all your settings and to remember what's already been backed up:

• Backing up your Pictures - Picasa Help On-line

Organizing Your Library

Picasa provides several helpful ways to organize and manage your Library.

• • Folders, Albums, and People. Picasa automatically detects and organizes pictures according to where they are on your computer. This is represented by the Folders section in your Library view. You can also create your own groups of photos in Albums. These are only visible in Picasa, and deleting a photo from an album, just removes it from the collection, not from the computer or folder. Lastly, Picasa 3.5 has added People tagging, so you can organize people based on the face detection and people tagging activity within Picasa. See Adding Name Tags for more instructions on tagging people.

  • Tagging. You can also tag your photos to make it easier to search for them. Each tag acts like a keyword that you can quickly associate with a photo or a whole group of pictures. Check out this topic in Picasa Help for more details.

  • Captions. You can easily add a caption to any photo. Text in captions is available for searching when you are looking for a photo. See the on-line topic for more details.

  • Favourites. Another great way to highlight your favourite photos is to mark them with a star. This provides another way of quickly finding some of your best photos. Check on-line for detailed instructions.

Finding Pictures in Your Library

One of the great things about Picasa is the speed and accuracy of finding photos once you've stored them.

Picasa can search based any text associated with a photo. This includes the following:

• • Filenames

  • Captions

  • Tags

  • Folder or album names

  • Camera maker

  • Date (i.e. 'November' or '2008')

Enter a term in the search box in the upper-right corner of your Library. As you type your search term, Picasa refines the results. To narrow your search, include multiple words in your search criteria. Learn more about searching in Picasa on-line.

More About Picasa

As mentioned in our previous tutorial, we've selected Picasa for a number of reasons to be our main Photo Management program. The following video reviews some of the features of Picasa 3.0: