Portable / NAS Drive Installation

You can create a Picasa database and set of pictures on a Portable or USB drive. With PicasaStarter installed on the portable drive, the drive can be connected to any PC with Picasa 3.9 installed. The pictures can then be displayed and edited. This is especially useful for showing pictures when you are out of the office or not at your home base.

NOTE: This same procedure can be used to create a Network Drive installation. Use the Windows Map Network Drive functions in Windows Explorer to map a network drive folder to the desired drive letter in Connect and Configure below.

Connect and Configure the Portable Drive:

A Portable Drive will be used with a number of PCs of various configurations, so in selecting the Drive Letter for your Portable Drive you should consider using a fairly high drive letter to avoid a conflict with existing drives on other PCs. For these reasons we usually use the P: Drive for our Portable Picture drives.

If the P: drive is in use on many of your computers, use a letter high enough to avoid conflicts with existing drives on other computers.

• 1. Connect the Portable Drive to the PC, and note which drive letter is assigned to it.

  2. In the Windows Control Panel, go to Disk Management and select the portable drive.

  3. Change the drive letter of the Portable Drive to P: or your desired drive letter.

Install PicasaStarter on Portable Drive:

• 1. Create a folder at the root of the Portable drive called PicasaStarter. (You will then have the path: P:\PicasaStarter )

  2. Download the PicasaStarter program Zip file here: PicasaStarter Program

  3. Copy PicasaStarter.exe and it's DLL files from the zip file to the P:\PicasaStarter folder you created.

Start and Configure PicasaStarter:

• 1. Double-click the .exe file to start PicasaStarter. If a windows protection message pops up select Run Anyway.

  2. A Missing Settings File window will open because we have not created one yet, so select NO so we can continue and create one.

  3. A "First Run" screen will come up unless PicasaStarter settings are already assigned. Select OK on the first run screen to keep the default settings.

  4. At this point select "Personal Database of..." on the PicasaStarter main screen and click Run Picasa. Your normal Picasa window should appear and should run normally. If it does not, please troubleshoot the installation. Picasa should run identically to the way it runs when started without using PicasaStarter.

  5. Exit Picasa, and the PicasaStarter window should pop back up ready for additional configuration.

Create a Picture Folder(s) on Portable Drive:

• 1. Create a folder called Pictures at the Root of the portable drive ( It will be P:\Pictures if it is on the P: Drive).

Note: This folder will contain the pictures. It can be named anything that suggests what it contains, for instance, Vacation Pictures, and there can be multiple folders at the root of the drive, and of course each picture folder can contain any number of subfolders and pictures.

• 2. You can copy a few pictures (or many pictures) to this folder to test the configuration.

Create a Database:

Use the procedure below to create a new empty database for this Portable Drive

Create a Database:
Use the procedure below to create a new empty database for this Portable DriveAt the main screen click the Add button to create and configure a new database.

1. Give the new database a descriptive name and description in the first 2 boxes.

2. Define a Database Path. The Database Path will contain the Picasa database files for the database you have just named. Use the Destination Path Browse button to browse to your Portable Drive, and Make a New Folder at the root of the drive (P:\Your_Folder_Name for example). This folder can have the same name you used above or you can give it another name describing that it is a database. Select the new folder and click OK. This creates the new database location.

   • Click on the Create Empty Database button to create an empty database.

   • Back in the Database Configuration dialog the Backup and Virtual Drive settings can be left blank for now, so Click OK to return to the PicasaStarter main screen.

   • Click Run Picasa and Picasa should start using the new database. If this is the first time this database was run, Picasa will ask if you want to search for pictures. Click NO because we want to tell it to only look at the Portable drive Pictures folder.

   • Once Picasa has started, go to the Tools menu - Folder Manager, and set all drives and locations in the Folder List to Remove From Picasa.

   • While still in the Folder Manager, go to the portable drive in the Folder List, Click on the portable drive to see it's subfolders, and set the Pictures folder you created above to Scan Always, and click OK in the folder manager. Picasa will now start scanning and loading the pictures in the Pictures folder into the database and Picasa screen.

   • You can now copy any Pictures and picture folders to the Pictures directory on the Portable Drive and they will be indexed and included in the database.

   • There are some advanced settings such as Mapping the Virtual Pictures Drive that can be useful in some circumstances, so see the users guide for these settings options.

NOTE: This procedure creates a new database and a new set of pictures on the Portable Drive. If you wish to move your pictures from your user account to the portable drive and keep all your Captions, Facetags, and Albums, see the Users Guide for methods to accomplish this without having to rebuild the database from scratch.