#Substitutes for picasa 3.9 how to#
#Substitutes for picasa 3.9 software#
#Substitutes for picasa 3.9 windows#

If you are using Windows Vista, they are stored in C:Usersyour_user_nameAppDataLocalGooglePicasa2Albums. You will first need the Picasa albums definitions (.pal files).Here is the procedure to convert Picasa Albums into Lightroom Collections: OpenOffice would also give you similar tools. So, I decided to use tools that almost everybody has at home: Excel and Word (I used Office 2007 for this tutorial). How will I convert one file into the other ? This could most probably be done by writing a script in Perl for example but I did not want to rely on my long forgotten Perl knowledge.The smart collections files are simply a set of instructions that can be used to automate the search of images within your Lightroom catalog. How could I import a list of files into Lightroom ? You will see that it is easy when you know how Lightroom smart collections work.What is the content of these files ? Luckily, the content of the files is easy to understand, they are basically XML files where you will find the name and content (filenames complete with paths) of the albums.

#Substitutes for picasa 3.9 how to#

First of all, where are the albums stored by Picasa ? Following the loss of all my Picasa albums after an update, I had already done some research to find how to restore my Picasa albums and I knew where they could be found.

So I had to find another, more general, way to do it. Sometimes it works, sometimes is does not. Picasa also seems to be unreliable for saving keywords to files. Picasa does not save the keywords that your have attributed to other formats such as RAW, PSD, PNG, TIFF, movies,… in the files themselves, only in the picasa.ini file in their corresponding folder. Easy ! There are problems with this approach however: this is only working for files where Picasa can save IPTC data: JPEG files. You could then search for all pictures containing the keyword “album1” in Lightroom and create a collection accordingly. The simplest one would involve selecting all the images of a Picasa album and attributing them a keyword related to the album (e.g. Compared to painstakingly looking at each album in Picasa and finding the same image again in Lightroom, this is already a huge improvement, especially if you have many albums and images.

#Substitutes for picasa 3.9 software#

So, what you will get is simply the transfer of the list of images from one software to the other. Picasa and Lightroom have different ways of storing this information and I don’t think that this conversion would be possible. What you should not expect from this conversion: Transfer the list of star-rated pictures from Picasa to Lightroom.Convert the albums easily with just a little bit of file manipulation – don’t worry: nothing complex !.Get the contents of your Picasa albums in Lightroom collections.What you can expect from this conversion: This tutorial is also available as a pdf. The rest of this post will describe how I did it. Dissecting the required process into simple steps made it easier to find a solution. Neither Picasa nor Lightroom support this kind of transfer and I could not find any solution that suited me on the Internet. A related issue was that I had many star-rated pictures in Picasa that I also wanted to transfer. With 40K+ pictures and several thousands sorted in albums, I could not afford to lose this information when switching to Lightroom. My only issue before switching to Lightroom was that I first had to make sure that I could import the numerous albums that I had created to sort my pictures in Picasa. While I still believe that this is the fastest images manager that I have ever seen, it has some limitations and I have been thinking about using Adobe Lightroom instead. pics57.For sorting and classifying my pictures, I have been using Picasa for quite some time now.If you are a Geeks on Tour member, you can watch several videos that show different aspects of cropping as well as some other basic editing tools: Then you just drag a rectangle around the picture you want to keep and click Apply. I chose 4X6 for all of the pictures above just so they’d be the same. What you choose depends on the final destination for the picture. When you use the crop tool, you have the choice of ‘Manual’ so you can make it exactly as wide and high as you’d like, or you can choose a width/height proportion like 4X6, or Square, or 16X10 for HDTV displays etc. If you don’t have that lens, you can crop the picture later to get closer. If you have a good optical zoom lens on your camera, you can bring your subject closer when you take the picture. Almost every picture can be improved with a crop. This week’s Picasa tip takes us back to some basics of making pictures look better.