Picasa2 (“P2” hereinafter) is a freeware application from Google. It can be used to “organise” photos that are on your hard drive/s. It has a lot of functionality which is listed in summary here. You can download Picasa2 from here.

The build number that I have installed is 18.84.

I have been using P2 a lot in managing a growing collection of digital photos which are mostly in JPG format but includes photos in other formats (TIF, PNG, BMP, etc). It can be used for most common types of digital image formats. I have found it an excellent application for organising my collection of photos and making quick fixes to improve their quality. A particularly useful aspect of its functionality is preparation of self-contained slide shows written to autoexecuting CDs or DVDs. I wrote a previous article on P2 for Sixteen Bits, with a follow up correction relating to hiding pictures. These notes augment those articles.

In managing a collection of photos I have found P2 to be extremely useful because I can find photos so easily, using the P2 search engine. This feature enables lightning fast finding of photos which are displayed initially as thumbnails. The search engine finds relevant photos by looking at folder names, file names, captions and keywords. Entering a word or partial word into the search pane pops up the relevant photos instantaneously. Entering more than one word or partial word generates a display of the photos that have all the words or partial words embedded somewhere in the folder name or photo name or caption or keyword.

Another excellent feature of P2 is that it "watches" changes made to folder names, file names, and the location of folders and files. It also watches for the creation of new files and folders and includes them automatically in its database. This means that I don't have to tell Picasa about locations or names that I have changed, or to tell it to add new photos.

IPTC-compliant keywords and captions can be added to JPG photos using P2. IPTC-compliant captions and keywords added to photos using applications like Irfanview and Photoshop are recognised by P2 and vice-versa. The headers and captions are not stored in the P2 database, but are embedded in headers within the photos themselves. This means that work undertaken on adding keywords and captions will not be wasted if I decide to move to another application that is is able to use information in IPTC-compliant headers. I understand that this is true also in respect of the new Adobe XMP protocol.

After acquiring a new digital camera and two grandchildren I started to accumulate lots of photo files. Initially I spent a lot of time renaming photos from something like "DSC01234.JPG" to "Xmas party dinner 2004.JPG" However, because of the excellent search engine in P2 and the way it operates, I have stopped giving meaningful descriptive names to my photo files. Now I actually rename my files to very short names using a bulk renaming function. Instead of putting meaningful text information into the file names I have concentrated on setting up meaningful folder names (e.g. 2004 Xmas party") and inserting keywords and, to a lesser extent, captions into the photos. It is very easy to insert one or more keywords into photos. This can be done individually or to a batch of photos.

In using P2, you may find some of the following suggestions and ideas useful.

1. In P2, you can assign keywords in bulk; highlight all the photos to which you want to assign a common keyword (like "xmas") and then add the keyword. The keyword is then applied to ALL the highlighted photos. Then highlight subsets that can have another common keyword, and add that keyword. Then highlight any photo that is to have a keyword unlike the others, and add that keyword. And so on. This does not take much time when you know how to do it. Ctrl+K pops up the keyword dialog box.
   
2. To add a caption in P2, double-click the thumbnail, then add the caption below the expanded view of the photo.  
   
3. Adding captions in P2 is a pain, because if you make a spelling error you have to backspace to the point where you want to make the change. A better way is to use Irfanview to do the captions. I have installed Irfanview and associated it with JPG and all my other image file types. When I am in P2, a right-click on a thumbnail or larger image pops up a context menu. Clicking on "Open file" (or "Open with...") opens the photo in Irfanview, without exiting from P2. Hit the Information icon on the Irfanview toolbar, hit the IPTC button, hit the Caption tab, then type in the caption. Hit Write, OK, and exit Irfanview. You are now back to P2.
   
4. In Irfanview you can also assign captions in bulk (e.g. "Xmas party at Weetangera 2004") very easily to a group of photos. You can then then add extra endings to individual photos' captions (e.g. a caption relating to the Turkey can then become "Xmas party at Weetangera 2004 - Turkey from the Saxon Turkey Farm"). To do the bulk adding of a caption, for any photo in the P2 folder, do an Open file or Open with, and when in Irfanview, click on the thumbnails icon on the top Irfanview tool bar. Highlight all the icons of interest, then hit File/JPG lossless operations..../Set IPTC data... Then write in the caption to be applied, hit Write, OK, and exit Irfanview.
   
5. Make your folder names meaningful. Include the year (and maybe month and location) in your folder names. e.g. "2004 Xmas Weetangera". This means that in Picasa2, the left-hand folder display pane will list your folders in Alpha within Chronological order, making them easy to find if you are scrolling the pane. To show the photos that are in the folder of interest, simply click it in the left-hand folder pane. No pain! Keep in mind that a Search operation in P2 will also operate on folder names, so typing "xmas" or "2005 xmas" will display all the folders that have that in the folder name (or in the caption, or a keywords, or in the file name). So the search function can get you to the folder of interest very quickly, too.
   
6. When you import files into P2, don't waste time renaming them. Leave them with the camera-assigned name (e.g. DSC01236.JPG). Time spent typing text is better spent in adding keywords and captions as a bulk plus individualised operation. Another benefit is that very short unobtrusive file names will not be irritatingly obvious if you burn some images to a Gift CD (note that P2 always includes the file names in the Gift CD). On the Gift CD, the information that your recipients of Gift CDs will get most information from is the Caption, which will show nicely underneath the picture.
    
7. If you want to order your photos within a folder into some meaningful sequence or groups, you can drag and drop them around in P2. This means that if someone gives you some additional photos that you want to put into the same folder, the file name can be anything. After they are in the folder, simply drag them around to get the required ordering or grouping. The order you then have will determine the order of the slides if they are written to a Gift CD.
   
   
8. Having determined the order of photos in a folder by dragging them around, I then do a bulk renaming of them so that (a) the names are as short and unobtrusive as possible, and (b) the order is set when I am looking at files in some other viewer (e.g. Irfanview, Windows Explorer). For example, I could rename the photos in a folder to something like xw01.jpg to xw67.jpg. For this example, xw stands for Xmas at Weetangera. I could have named them simply 01.jpg to 67.jpg, but if I am collating photos for some other purpose (don't ask me what) I could have problems, in that there might be some other file also named 01.jpg in other folders.
   
   
9. P2 has a file renaming function and you can rename a batch of files in the one folder. However, it is primitive and has a problem - say you rename everything with a start string of AB. The first photo will be renamed AB, the second will be AB-1, the third will be AB-3, etc. Problem is that AB-1 has alphabetic precedence over AB, so AB appears LAST in the set when written to a Gift CD, or viewed in Explorer or Irfanview, or whatever. There would not have been a problem if the first photo was named AB-0. Also some sort algorithms will give AB-19 precedence over AB-2. Irfanview does renaming much better. Like Picasa2, in the Irfanview thumbnail view mode the thumbnails can be dragged and dropped into the desired order. Then hit File/Start batch dialog.. Then set up a Name Pattern (such as xw##). Hit Start, Exit, and exit Irfanview. P2 will have lost track of the new names, so hit Folder/Refresh Thumbnails. My files will now be named xw01.jpg to xw67.jpg. Very neat. Very easy.
   
   
10. Keep in mind that when you do a search in P2, the terms you enter into the search panel will identify files and folders that have the terms embedded within:
    • a file's keywords or caption or file name
    • a folder's name
      
    • all the folders that are children folders of that folder
      
      
11. This search process can be very useful when you know what's going on. I could not understand why some searches were displaying ALL my photos when I searched for photos into which I had inserted the keyword "mike". The reason is that the search found the folder c:\documents and settings\mike\ and all the folders under that that had photos in them. Like, EVERY digital photo on my PC! I reigned that in by making appropriate settings in Tools/Folder Manager. Set "Remove from Picasa" and "Watch for Changes" carefully. However, once I knew what was going on, I found the Search facility very useful, and stunningly fast. So for example, searching for "xmas" will show all the folders that have xmas in their names plus all the children folders below that, and adding 2004 to the search pane will narrow the search to show only the folders that have xmas AND 2004 in their names (plus all the children folders below that). Plus of course, files that have xmas AND 2004 in their names or captions or keywords would be shown. The consequence of this search technology is that providing that you have an idea about SOMETHING that you put in a folder name or file name or caption or keyword, you can generally find the target file/s you want VERY easily and quickly. Beats the heck out of searching for the files in Explorer.
    
    
12. One thing that does not work properly in P2 is the keyword Delete function. After deleting a keyword in P2 it IS erased from the keyword list, but not from a database that P2 maintains. To correct this fault, after you delete a keyword from a photo or photos in a folder, then go to Tools/Folder Manager, assign the Remove from Picasa setting to the folder, exit the folder manager, then re-enter the folder manager and assign the Watch for Changes setting to the folder. Exit the Folder manager, then all is fixed. 
    
    
13. If you are preparing a Gift CD or DVD, if you only want some photos in a folder to be included, Hide the photos that you do not want to be written to the CD. To Hide, highlight the photos to be hidden, right-click one, select Hide. To set the order for the photos to be shown on the Gift CD, drag them into the desired order. Do the Hiding and reordering for each of the folders to be included, before hitting the Gift CD button. After doing the CD writing, remember to Unhide the photos that you hid.
    
    
14. Final tip: If you want an expanded view of a thumbnail file, double-click it. If you want a full-screen view, hit the Slideshow button.
    

I hope these random notes are of some assistance to you if you are using Picasa. I may add to them as time goes by.

Mike Boesen

7 July 2005

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