Getting started with Picasa

Introduction

This tutorial is an attempt to make some suggestions as to how to use Picasa in to manage your digital photos. There are other ways to do things, but it is a useful start to get inspiration.

A nice starter to get a feeling of what Picasa can do for you is to watch these promo movies:

• Introducing Picasa 3

• What's new in Picasa 3.5

How to install and configure Picasa on your computer

Download and run the installer program (picasa39-setup.exe) from the OneDrive link found at this page: Picasa final version

During the install, you'll be asked whether you want Picasa to search your whole computer or just some areas. To start with, select the limited areas. The initial scan of your photos and videos may take a while, depending upon how many photos you have. As soon as Picasa starts scanning, you can go to the menu Tools > Folder Manager to add ("Scan Always") or remove folders that you don't want scanned.

IMPORTANT

• Picasa is simply finding your photos and videos and will display them to you (with some exceptions).

• Picasa is NOT making copies of them.

• Picasa is NOT uploading the photos to any website.

• Picasa is NOT moving photos anywhere.

• Picasa is NOT modifying or changing the photos in any way.

• Picasa is simply finding the photos and indexing some info about them so that you can quickly search and browsing for them in Picasa.

• After Picasa is done with its scan of the computer, your photos will be right where they were before, and they'll still be completely accessible to any and all programs on the computer.

Note that your photos are NOT automatically backed up anywhere simply because you have installed and run Picasa. We'll get to backups later.

Picasa will likely have found some photos on your disk. If Picasa isn't seeing all your photos, go to Tools > Folder Manager in the Picasa menu. In the "Folder List" on the left side of the "Folder Manager" dialog, find the directory you set for your imports. Click on that directory and then click on the "Scan Always" choice on the right side of the dialog for all folders from which Picasa should scan. If you still don't see your pictures, check "How to Find Missing Photos"

In the left-hand panel of the Picasa window, you'll see a list of folder icons for any folders that have pictures. Click on one of the folders in the folder list and the right-hand-side should scroll to the thumbnails for the photos that are in that folder.

Note that the folder list is shown as a flat list of folders. You don't see the hierarchy that you might see in Windows Explorer. If you would rather see hierarchy, enable View > Folder View > Tree View. Following is an example of Tree View. You can see subfolders (nested folders) of the main folder called "Pictures":

IMPORTANT: If you run Picasa in "Flat Folder View" and the pictures are actually in a nested folder hierarchy on your hard disk, you need to be very careful when deleting folders. In "Flat Folder View," you can't tell if a folder contains sub- or nested folders (which are folders inside of folders). If you delete a folder, you will (like in any application) delete that folder and any nested folders it contains! So if you want to delete a folder, it is safer to enable "Tree view" where folders are not nested.

You also can choose the order in which the folders are shown. Click View > Folder View, then check "Sort by Creation Date." This tells Picasa to show the folders sorted in chronological order, newest folders at the top. The date of the folder used for sorting is by default the "Date taken" of the oldest picture in it, but you can change this date by double-clicking the folder in the folder list. "Sort by Name" sorts your folders by file name (numerical and alphabetical).

You will also want to configure where Picasa stores photos that you import. "Import" is when you plug in your camera (or memory card or scanner) and get Picasa to copy photos from the camera (or card, or scanner) into a new folder on your PC. By default, pictures are imported to "My Pictures." If you want to change this, click Tools > Options and look at the bottom of the General tab for "Save Imported Pictures In"

Picasa is now configured to know where your photos are, and it knows where to put newly imported photos.

Importing photos from your camera

Warning: Importing is one of the functions that suffered from changes in Windows or Mas OS. Since Google stopped maintaining Picasa you may have to copy the photos from a camera card to the computer using other means such as Windows File Explorer. More info: Import photos and videos using Picasa or Windows File Explorer

A quick summary of the import process:

1. Plug in the memory card (or camera)

2. Enter a meaningful folder name for the soon to-be-imported photos

3. Select the "Delete only copied photos" option

4. Click "Import All"

5. Move pictures from different events that were imported to the same folder into separate folders

Details of the import process:

After you take some pictures with your camera, remove the memory card out of the camera and insert it into a memory card reader. If you don't have a reader, you can attach the camera directly to your computer (to a USB port) as long as you've installed the drivers for your camera (from the CD that came with the camera or online).

At this point, Windows should recognize that you've just plugged in a new device (the memory card or the camera itself) and you should get a popup that gives you several options as to what you want Windows to do. Choose the option that says something like "Copy pictures to your computer and view them using Picasa"

Windows may already be configured to automatically do something when you plug in the camera or memory card. For now, if it does something you don't want, you can cancel out of whatever was automatically initiated, manually run Picasa, and then click Picasa's "Import" button and continue on with the Picasa import. Or, you can do imports with any other program you want. You would just need to make sure that Picasa's Folder Manager was configured to "Scan Always" the folder(s) where the other program was putting the imported photos.

At this point, Picasa should automatically start the import process. Importing has a couple of phases. First, you'll see all the thumbnails (this happens quickly) popping out on the side. Then, Picasa will begin copying the high resolution photos from the memory card into a hidden folder in your normal import area. This will take a little bit of time. VERY IMPORTANT: Your import is NOT done yet, even when the copying phase is done.

You typically never want duplicate copies of your photos on your computer: it's confusing and it wastes disk space. Typically you don't want to leave pictures on your camera's memory card either: leaving old photos on the card is liable to lead to duplicate copies of your photos on disk. So, it is best import everything on the card and delete the just-imported photos from the camera's memory card - with this warning: Be sure the photos you just imported are backed up somewhere else! If you delete from the memory card without making a backup, you now have only one copy on your computer.

Next, you can adjust the import top level folder. Then specify a nice meaningful name for the "Folder title" of the imported photos, such as "2020_04_25_wanda_3rd_birthday" or "2012_Christmas 2012" You can use any file-naming system you want. You can choose whether to include the date in the directory name or not. Picasa will keep track of the date of a folder separately from its name. If you do include a date, the YYYY/MM/DD format is a good choice as it will take care that the folders are sorted in a logical way in Windows File Explorer or Mac's "Finder."

Then click the "Import All" button to do the actual import.

Note: Some people won't trust Picasa to import all photos and wipe the card correctly. And, to be fair, in the past, there have been painful bugs in this critical area of the program. The safest way to do imports is to import everything from the card to your hard disk while telling Picasa to leave the card alone, immediately update your backups to include the new, just imported photos, and THEN go back and wipe the photos from the memory card.

Now that the import is done, you will see your new folder on the left panel of Picasa. This is where you'll see your just-imported folder of photos.

If you don't import your pictures every day, chances are that you have pictures of multiple events imported in a single folder. To put photos in separate folders, select all the pictures of the second event then right-click and choose "Move to new folder..." to move them to a separate folder.

Editing Photos

Now we'll do a little photo editing. Note that this is all safe stuff we're going to do. None of these things will hurt your photos. Just walk through and do this stuff and you'll get a good feel for how to do some simple editing in Picasa, and how undo always lets you get back to the original version of the photo.

Scroll around in the folder list and find a folder you're interested in and click on it. That will scroll the right-hand-side of Picasa's screen to the thumbnails for that folder. Find a photo that is a little underexposed (dark). That way, it'll be easy to see the effects of our editing. Double-click on the photo you want to edit. It will show up "full screen" in Picasa's "Edit Room" on the right side of the screen, and is ready for some editing.

Now, in the left-hand side of the screen, you'll see a five edit tabs:

1. The "Wrench" (Commonly needed fixes)

2. The "Half-lit sun" (Finely-tuned lighting and color fixes)

3. The "Paintbrush" (Fun and useful image processing)

4. The "Paintbrush with green" (More fun and useful image processing)

5. The "Paintbrush with blue" (Even more fun and useful image processing)

• The effects on the 1st tab include Crop, Straighten, Redeye, I'm Feeling Lucky, Auto Contrast, Auto Color, Retouch, Text, and Fill Light.

• On the 2nd tab, you'll see slider bars for Fill Light, Highlights, Shadows, and Color Temperature.

• The 3rd tab includes Sharpen, Sepia, B&W, Tint, Glow (and more).

• On the last two tabs are fun edits such as Infrared Film, 1960's, Invert Colors, Boost, Soften, Border, Museum Matte, Comic book (and much more).

Start with the "Wrench" (Basic Fixes) tab. Click the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button. The colors and brightness will most likely be better than they were before.

Click the "Undo I'm Feeling Lucky" button. Your picture will revert to its previous (original) state. Now, click on the next tab over - the "Tuning" tab - and drag the "Fill Light" slider a bit over to the right. The picture will get brighter. Then, click the "Auto Contrast" button. Some parts will darken, other parts may lighten. Switch back to the "wrench" (Basic Fixes) tab and click the Crop button. Click the 4x6 choice (upper left of your screen) and then drag a rectangle across your picture. You can drag the "crop rectangle" around on your picture to position it where you want it. And you can resize the rectangle by dragging its edges or corners. When you've got it where you want it, click the Apply button (upper left). Under Crop, try the Manual option.

Look on the bar below the photo. See the "Make a caption!" text? Click on it and type in a caption for the photo. That caption will appear in the "Info" area of Google Photos. When printing using Picasa, you can have the caption printed with the photo.

Now click the Undo Crop button. The crop we just did will be "undone" (but the "Auto Contrast" and "Fill Light" edits are still in place). Now we can click the "Undo Auto Contrast" button and then the "Undo Fill Light" button.

So, you see that you can build up multiple edits and then easily undo them. All these edits are not harming your original photo in any way.

There are a lot of other editing tools. Look at the edits on the five tabs and try them out. They're all completely safe, and you can always "undo" anything you do in Picasa. Two important points here: Play with the edits so you learn what they all do and what's available; and know that every edit you do is safe and completely "Undo"-able.

Some remarks:

• The Straighten tool can be very useful for those times when you have a picture with an unintended tilt.

• The "Auto Contrast" and "I'm Feeling Lucky" options sometimes seems to go a little "too far" on some photos. Instead, you can go to the "Tuning" tab and use "One-click fix for lighting" or manually play with "Fill Light," "Highlights" and "Shadows" sliders.

When you edit photos in Picasa, Picasa will never change your original photo

You can always do any edits you want in Picasa. And you can always "undo" those same edits and you can ALWAYS get back to the original unedited version of your photo. Automatically. There no need to manually save a copy of original version of the photo.

For typical usage: don't ever "save" your Picasa edits. Really. As long as you use Picasa to view, edit, organize, and share your photos, there no need whatsoever to actually save the changes and update the jpeg on disk. Picasa always "remembers" all your changes and automatically applies them to your photos "on the fly" for ANYTHING you do with the photos from within Picasa. The edits you make in Picasa are saved in its database.

If you want the edited photos for use in another program you can use the export functionality (File > Export picture to folder..."). The export feature will create a new directory full of newly-created jpegs that include all your Picasa edits, plus you have a lot of control over the size and quality of the resulting newly-generated jpeg files.

But what if you actually want to update the jpeg image on disk? Maybe you want to view that jpeg file in some other application and you wanted all of your Picasa edits to "be there" and you don't want to do an export.

To do this, select an edited photo, then click File > Save; or right-click > Save; or press Ctrl-S. These save functions update the currently selected JPG on disk to reflect the edits you've done in Picasa. Note that Picasa is automatically making a backup of your original photo so that even a "Save" operation can be undone.

In Picasa, after you do any edits, you will no longer see the original, unedited photo in Picasa. It doesn't matter if you've saved or not - Picasa will always show you the all-edits-applied version of a photo. If you save the edits, the original photo is safely stashed in a hidden .picasaoriginals folder, but Picasa doesn't show it to you. You can find that hidden folder in Window File Explorer if your settings are set to show hidden folders.

Click the "Back To Library" button (upper left). This takes us from the "Edit Room" back out to the main Library view.

Now, in the Folder bar (just above the thumbnails for each folder) you should see a blue floppy disk button. When hovering over that button, it says "Save edited photos to disk." Note that even an auto-rotate orientation change is a change that is ready to be saved. If you click a folder's "Save" button, Picasa will make backup copies of all of the photos in that folder that have edits and then re-write the jpeg files so that all of the edits are reflected in the jpegs on disk in that folder.

Redeye tool and Retouch tool

Exceptions: there are currently two edits where Picasa actually does rewrite the jpeg image without asking us (but, it makes that backup image for us so that we can still easily undo the change and retrieve our original photo). These two edits are the "Red Eye removal" edit and the "Retouch" edit. What this means is that if you do some edits (such as a crop and an auto-contrast), and then you do a Red Eye fix, after the Red Eye fix is done, the JPEG on disk has actually been updated to reflect the two "remembered" edits as well as the Red Eye fix, even though you didn't explicitly do a save operation. That's not a big deal, but sometimes people are surprised about that behavior.

A bug was discovered when using the Redeye tool in a previous version - Picasa 3.9.141 (build 259), but is not harmful: After using the red eye correction feature of the Picasa editor, Picasa left a JPG.tmp (temporary) file in the original folder. The name of the file will be the same name of the photo that was just corrected but with the addition of the .tmp extension. This unwanted file is created regardless of whether or not you "save" the corrected photo. The size of the file is slightly less than the photo. The .tmp can be deleted with no problems - delete the .tmp file(s) in Windows Explorer. You can still undo the edit as long as you have the .picasaoriginals folder and .picasa.ini file in the folder containing the photos. When editing a large number of photos for red eye, you can end up with quite a few files that need to be deleted. Red eye reduction is the only edit that seems to leave this unwanted .tmp file.

Albums

OK, now we have a bunch of pictures in separate event-based folders: 450 pictures of a trip to Bryce Canyon National Park. 250 Pictures of a trip to the Grand Canyon. We all like our pictures. But NOBODY else wants to see my 450 pictures of Bryce Canyon. Plus, not all of those 450 pictures are really keepers. I'm good, but I'm not *that* good ;-)

This is where Albums come in. And it's critical that you understand albums. It's important that you know the difference between albums and folders. It's all explained in greater detail here: Folders and Albums

• Folders actually contain photos.
• The folders you see in Picasa are the real folders you see on disk in Windows Explorer.
• If you delete a photo from a folder in Picasa, the real photo in the real folder on disk is deleted.
• If you delete a photo from a folder on disk using Windows Explorer, it will disappear from Picasa's view as well.
• Albums, on the other hand, are things that exist only within Picasa and do not take up disk space.
• Albums "point to" photos in folders.
• Albums don't actually have their own copies of photos.
• Albums let you create multiple ways to view and organize the photos in your folders.
• If you add a photo to an album, the photo remains in its folder and Picasa adds a reference to that photo to the album.
• If you delete a photo from an album, the photo remains in its folder and Picasa removes that album's reference to that photo.
• A photo exists in exactly one folder, but the photo can appear in (be referenced by) several albums.
• If you delete a photo from a folder, the photo will be removed from the folder AND any albums it appears in (because the albums no longer have a photo to reference).
• Albums help you organize your photos.
• The first level of organization is the folders themselves.
• Albums let you define multiple other ways to group and organize photos.

What we're going to do next is to make a "Best of" album that references the best photos in a folder.

Click on one of your folders that contains a fair number of photos. Let's say it's the Bryce Canyon folder. In the right-hand pane, double-click on the first photo. Now you'll see it in the "edit room" taking up most of the screen. If you like the picture and want it to end up in your "best of" album, mark it by clicking the yellow star button (bottom center). Or, you can tap the space bar to toggle the star on and off. To scroll to the next photo, just rotate the mouse wheel. Don't like the next one so much? Don't "star" it and scroll on to the next one. Once you've gotten through all the photos and "starred" the best ones, click the "Back to Library" button. Then click the "Bryce Canyon" folder on the left (to get back to the top of the thumbnails for that folder) and then click the "Select Starred Photos" button (another yellow star button) on the left near the top of the screen. Now you should see all your starred photos in the Photo Tray (lower left). Those thumbnails will be really small. Now, click the "Add selected items to an Album" button (the "blue book" button just to the right of the Photo Tray) and select "New Album." Give the album a name such as "Best of Bryce" and click OK.

Now you should see your new "blue-book" album in the left-hand panel of Picasa, just above your list of Folders. The "Best of Bryce" album will act a lot like a folder, but it's a virtual album and exists only in Picasa. Click on the folder blue Album icon on the left of the screen. Now click on the "Play Fullscreen Slideshow" button (top left). You'll see a nice full-screen slideshow of the pictures in your album. Just the "best" ones.

Remember, an album doesn't actually contain the photos - the photos still reside in the folders. An album is really more like a play-list on an MP3 player. It's just a list of photos. But you can do a slideshow of all 450 photos in the Bryce folder, or you can do a slideshow of the 100 photos in the Best Of Bryce album.

You can make an album that includes photos from several folders. You could have a "Best Vacation Photos" album that referenced the best photos in the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Bryce Canyon, and Zion Canyon folders.

Now, you have the folders, which contains ALL the photos. And you have your albums, which "reference" subsets of the photos. To explicitly state what should now be obvious: Do NOT create a bunch of albums and then delete the folders. Why? Because if you delete the folders, the real photos are gone and the albums die because they can't see their photos anymore.

Albums are good for burning to Gift CDs, uploading to the Google Photos site, and just plain old photo organization.

For any photo you see in Picasa, whether it's in an album or a folder, you can always find out exactly where, on the computer, that photo resides. Right-click on any picture and choose "Locate on Disk." Doing this will cause Windows File Explorer to open and you'll see exactly where that photo resides on your computer. You can also right-click and choose Properties - this will open the Properties panel in Picasa where the top line shows you the location of the photo.

What's in the Collections List?

The Collections list contains folders, albums, and a lot more. See the previous section about Albums to learn the difference between albums and folders.

To see the Collections list, look at the left panel of Picasa. Depending on if you have "Flat Folder View" or "Tree View" selected, you'll see different "Collections" of albums and folders. Flat Folder View will show you a whole bunch of collections. Tree View will show you only 3 collections (Albums, People, Folders). Beginners will find Tree View easier and simpler to use than Flat Folder View.

To expand or close any of the Collections, click the arrow to the left of the collection name. When the arrow is red, click it to open the collection. When the arrow is green, click it to close the collection.

At the top is the Albums collection. This is a "virtual" collection of pictures. In this collection, you'll see some albums that look like "green books": these are automatically maintained by Picasa. Some of these green book albums are called Recently Uploaded, Screensaver, Starred Photos. You'll also see some "blue book" albums - these are albums that you explicitly created. You may see some yellow/orange albums with green "up" arrows - these are albums that were once uploaded to Picasa Web Albums / Google+ / Google Photos. If the photo has been removed from Picasa Web Albums or Google Photos, the green arrow can remain on the thumbnail in Picasa. To remove it, right-click on the thumbnail photo, scroll down to Online Actions, then Refresh Online Status.

In the People collection, you'll see your people albums. These are head shots and faces of people you tagged if you configured Name Tags under Tools > Options > Name Tags.

The Projects collection shows Collages, Movies, Screen Captures, and other projects you created within Picasa.

The Folders collection is where you'll see all your folders full of pictures. These folders contain the pictures and videos that reside on your computer.

Other collections you may see in the folder list include Web Albums, Downloaded Albums, Exported Pictures, Other Stuff, From Hello, Edited Pictures, Exports, and perhaps some dated categories such as "2007." Some of these categories were created in early versions of Picasa, so you may not see all of these if you recently installed Picasa. The "Other Stuff" collection (visible only in Flat Folder View) can contain smaller images, images from htm files, and videos and pictures that Picasa put there for some unexplained reason and can be moved to your Folders collection if desired.

Name Tags

When Picasa finishes its initial scan of your photos, it then starts the "Face Recognition" work. Picasa will go through all your photos, find the faces, group similar faces together, and let you identify the faces. There's a lot to this, but this will get you started. Learn more here: Using Name Tags (Face detection)

First, click the menu Tools > Options, go to the "Name Tags" tab and enable "Store name tags in photo"

Click on the "Unnamed" album (above the folders, and below the regular albums, in the folder list). You'll see a bunch of faces. Find a face you want to identify. Click on the white square that says "Add a name." Type the person's name (example "John Smith") and hit the "Enter" key. Picasa will prompt you to add a Google Contact for that person. Click the "New Person" button if you don't already have a Google Contacts entry for that person. Then click "OK." You don't need anything except the name, so this is really quick and easy.

Now, you'll see a separate album for "John Smith" and it'll probably have 5 or 10 pictures in it already. Within a few seconds, there will be some more suggestions. You can confirm or reject the suggestions. You can confirm all of them at once, or you can select a group of the suggestions and confirm or reject them. As you do this, more suggestions will be made. Within a few minutes, you will probably have a lot of photos of this "John Smith" guy identified.

People albums are ALBUMS. They're not folders. Picasa is not creating new folders or new copies of these photos. It's just recording information about where the faces of particular people are in your photos and letting you build "people albums" that let you quickly view all the photos of a particular person.

At the top of the "John Smith" people album, on the "album bar" there are two icons over to the right. Click on the square with arrows pointing out in all directions. This is the "View zoomed out to the full picture button. In other words, the people album photos change from a cropped headshot to the whole photo. Click on the "head" button. The people album photos switch back to just the headshot.

Find the nicest headshot of "John Smith" in his album and do a right-click on it and select "Set as people album thumbnail"

Go back to the "Unnamed" folder and identify a few more people and handle their suggestions.

Click the "head" button (the left-most of the four buttons in the lower right of the screen). This brings up the "People" tab. This gets you all kinds of neat things. You can hover the mouse over someone in a photo and Picasa will identify them. You can find photos that contain both John and Marsha by clicking on John's people album and then, on the people tab, clicking on Marsha. Then, do a control-click on Joey and you'll see photos that contain John, Marsha, AND Joey. Click the green "Back to View All" button to exit the searching mode. These name tags are a useful and fun feature.

Online Albums

Google disabled direct upload from Picasa in March 2018. Picasa continues to be useful for local management of a photo collection with basic editing and some extras such as creating collages with much more options than in Google Photos. Emailing photos from Picasa using Gmail was also disabled. Instead you can export (select the size you want) and add as attachment to a mail.

If you edited photos in Picasa3, you must create an edited copy on the computer by using Export or Save.

The "Export" method

To upload photos from an album in Picasa, you always need to "Export" to get a folder with the photos.

1. Select thumbnails in the library of Picasa, for example all photos in a folder. You can either use Ctrl+A or click between the photos to select none. To select photos from different folders/albums you must add them to the tray by clicking the green "Hold" button.

2. Click "Export" and select the options, for example "Use original size" (for image size) and image quality, for example "Automatic" or "Maximum." You can add numbers to preserve the order or add a watermark. See this link for details.

3. After clicking the "Export" button, the folder containing the exports automatically opens in File Explorer (or Finder on Mac)

4. Go to https://photos.google.com/settings and select "High Quality (free unlimited storage)" or "Original." This setting works for future uploads only. "High Quality" is free until June 1, 2021.

5. You can now either use the Upload button or drag & drop the selected photos to https://photos.google.com/

6. You also find the recently added photos on top at https://photos.google.com/search/_tra

7. But you can also create a new (empty) album or open an existing one, and drag & drop directly into the open album or use "Add to album" > "Select from computer"

8. After you checked that the upload succeeded, you can delete the exported folder on your computer (optional)

The "Save" method:

1. Instead of using "Export" you can replace the original by an edited copy in File Explorer (or Finder) by "Saving" the edits. The original is filed away to a hidden folder .picasaoriginals under the actual folder, which thus doubles the storage use on the computer. See this link for details. For albums created in Picasa the "Export" method is needed.

2. You can now use steps 4-6 of the "Export" method to upload the photos.

3. Immediately after the upload, you are prompted to add the photos to an album. You also find the recently added photos on top at https://photos.google.com/search/_tra

Back Up Your Photos

OK, so now you have a bunch of photos in folders. And you have created a bunch of albums that add layers of organization on top of the physical folder organization. You've done the face recognition and name tags. You've added tags and captions.

Don't bet that nothing bad will ever happen to your computer. More info: Backup your photos and videos

Make backups. The short version of my "backup rant" is this: If you're not going to religiously do backups of your digital photos, just put your camera away and don't bother taking photos. Without backups, you're going to lose them all within a few years. Disks die. Mistakes get made. No backups means the first time anything bad happens, you'll never see your photos again.

Seriously. Buy an external hard drive. As of this writing, you can get a 1TB external drive for $59.99 various places (stores, online shops). A 1TB drive will let you make backups of around 300,000 photos (depending upon the size of the photos). The Picasa Backup will safely back up all your photos, tags, captions, name tags, albums, and other Picasa things (like remembering which photos are starred).

Assign the external hard drive a letter towards the end of the alphabet, such as p:, so that it will always get that letter. Other USB devices may come and go and re-use the lower letters like E: and F: You want the backup drive to always have the same drive letter.

You tell Windows to assign a drive letter like this:

1. Connect the external drive to the computer.

2. Right-click > "Manage" on "Computer" (or "My Computer")

3. Click on "Disk Management"

4. Right-click on the external drive in the top pane and select "Change Drive Letter and Paths..."

5. Click "Change..." and select p: as the new drive letter.

Now, do a full backup to the external drive using Picasa (be aware that this method will not back up any text files that exist in the photos folders):

1. Tools > "Backup Pictures..." menu choice

2. Click "New Set" button

3. Type a name such as "My Backup 2011-April" in the Name field

4. Click "Disk-to-disk backup..."

5. Click the "Choose" button and select a folder on the p: drive (your external drive).

6. Create a folder called P:\"Picasa Backups" and set that as the backup destination.

7. Click the "Create" button to create the backup set definition.

8. Click the "Select All" button.

9. Click the "Backup" button.

Picasa will back up all the photos to your external drive when the drive is attached to the computer and turned on.

Later, after you import some more photos and/or do some more edits, you can come back to the same "My Backup 2011-April" backup set and click the "Select All" button and the "Backup" button and Picasa will then update the backup with any new and/or edited photos. These subsequent "incremental" backups are generally a lot faster than the original full backup. You need to do these incremental backups after you import new photos. Or, at least every week or so. Remember, photos that aren't backed up are subject to complete loss.

Now you have a backup on that external drive. You should find a cooperative friend and restore the backup on their computer. That tests the backup and it makes sure you know how to do a restore.

OK, now you have a backup of your photos. Now, if your computer's hard disk dies and becomes unreadable, you can recover all your photos with your backups.

You might get a new computer or install a new disk on your old/dead computer. You would then restore your backups to the recovered computer by running the PicasaRestore.exe program that is part of the backup itself. Now you're good to go again.

Think about having two separate external drives for backups. Store one backup "off site." If your house burns, your computer burns. And if your backup external drive is sitting there on the desk right next to the computer, it's gone too. Put a backup disk somewhere else - with a relative, a good friend, a safe deposit box at the bank, or at work, etc.

Keep one backup at home with the computer. That way, it will get updated regularly. It's right there in case you have a problem and need to use it.

Switch the drives back and forth so that the "off site" drive gets updated, too.

Two drives also lets you handle the very rare case where your C drive dies and then your external drive dies while you're trying to do the restore work. The odds of two disks failing is VERY small, but it has happened! That 2nd backup covers you.

You DEFINITELY need at least one external drive. Two externals are better. It's cheap insurance.

Managing albums and folders and the photos within them

If you have albums, Picasa knows where the original photos are located. Picasa has information about the photos stored in separate .picasa.ini files in the folders with the photos. When you have albums, do not use Windows Explorer to move or copy your photos around. If you do, you run the risk of completely confusing Picasa and messing up your album definitions and losing photo edits. This sounds bad and/or restrictive, but really, Picasa is your Photo Organizer. Use Picasa to organize your photos. Note that if you know what you're doing, you can use Windows File Explorer to move complete folders around, but never move individual photos from one folder to another using anything but Picasa.

Use Picasa to move photos from one folder to another - just drag the thumbnail(s) to a different folder in Picasa's folder list. When you use Picasa to move photos around, Picasa can easily adjust album definitions that reference the moved photos, and Picasa can keep the edits with the moved photos.

Use Picasa to move whole folders around: Right-click a folder and choose "Move Folder..." This is especially useful if you decide you want to move folders to a different drive letter.

Picasa can also split folders into multiple folders. Let's say you've just imported 100 photos into a folder called "Holiday Concert." But maybe 10 of those photos were actually of your pet dog Bowser, and were taken two days earlier. All we need to do is to move those 10 photos out of the "Holiday Concert" folder and into a new folder called "Bowser." To do that, select those 10 photos (click on the first doggy photo in the group, hold the Shift key down and click on the last doggy photo). You should now see all 10 photos of Bowser in the "photo tray" (lower left). Right-click on one of the selected Bowser thumbnails in the right-hand-side of the Picasa window and select "Move to New Folder..." Specify "Bowser" as the folder name and click OK. That will move the selected photos on your computer into a new folder called Bowser. Now you know how to move pictures into a new folder!

If you need some more techniques for managing photos and folders, here is another page with more details: Organize, move, copy, and rename photos

Summary

Once Picasa is configured, you simply

1. Shoot photos

2. Import them into a new folder

3. Confirm new "name album" suggestions for faces found in the newly imported photos

4. Edit the just-imported photos - crops, contrast, etc.

5. Build album(s) to add organization to the photos you just imported

6. Upload photos (with edits saved) to Google Photos online

7. Update your backup

This concludes the basic walk-through. You can read about other Picasa features like tags, geotags, Gift CDs, and printing at Picasa Resources