Move photos to an external hard disk

Step 1: preparation

1. Change the drive letter of the external drive to a letter at the end of the alphabet.

   1. Why: otherwise, if you disconnect your drive and connect eg. an USB stick, the drive letter could be taken when you reattach your hard drive. Windows would have to give it another drive letter. When you start Picasa, it won't find your pictures because the drive letter changed.

   2. Only do this if the drive is not already in use by other programs where changing the drive letter would break those programs.

      1. Plug in your external drive

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

      3. Click on "Disk Management"

      4. Right-click on your drive and select "Change driver letter and paths..."

      5. Set the drive to be another letter such as P:\

2. In Windows File Explorer or My Computer, create your picture folder on the external hard disk (example: P:\Pics). Copy at least one photo into this folder so Picasa will see it.

3. In Picasa, enable Tree View by going to the menu View > Folder View > Tree View. This lets you easily see which drive your folders of photos are in.

4. In Picasa, enable scanning of the Pics folder: Tools > Folder Manager..." browse to the P:\Pics folder and set it to "Scan Always"

Remark: the external hard disk must always be active before Picasa is started, otherwise Picasa will rescan everything. To avoid useless rescanning you can also set (older) folders to "Scan once", and back to "Scan always" when you want to add/edit them further.

Step 2: Decide whether you will move photos by using Method A or Method B

Method A

This method is the standard and safest way of moving folders in Picasa, and is great if you don't need to move too many folders. If you have a lot of folders to move one by one, it will be more complex but faster to use Method B.

On each folder in Picasa's folder list that is on the C:\ drive

1. Right-click > "Move Folder..."

2. Select P:\Pics\ as the destination for the move

3. Repeat the two previous steps for each folder on the C:\ drive

Method B

This method is a bit more complex, but can save you some time if you have a lot of folders that are all in one flat list.

1. Make sure Picasa is running

   1. Open Windows File Explorer or "My computer"

   2. Move all folders you want to move to the external hard disk (hard drive)

Move whole folders and their complete contents from the old drive to the new drive. Do not merge folders as part of the move, otherwise you will loose edits to pictures!!!