Getting Started in Organizing Your Picasa Photos

Beginners can easily become overwhelmed with their first time organizing photos in Picasa. What is nice about this software is that it is user-friendly and only requires a small learning curve. You can get more familiar with managing Picasa photos if you use the software more often. However, if you didn’t have the opportunity to be more accustomed to it, here are a few tips that can guide you when you are managing your Picasa photos.

Once you have installed Picasa in your system, the software will perform an initial scan of your computer’s possible photo directories. Of course, some of your pictures may not be stored there so you want Picasa to look at your other folders as well. To add a picture directories, go to “File” then select “Add Folder to Picasa” or alternatively, go to “Tools” and select “Folder Manager”. The Folder Manager enables you to set which folder directories that the application must always scan, so that you can manage Picasa photos more conveniently.

After you have configured the folder settings, the next thing that you need to do is choose which file types must be shown in Picasa. This will let you manage your Picasa photos precisely because it will discriminate the file types that you do not want to be accessed by the software. To do it, go to “Tools”, select “Options”(in Windows) or go to “Picasa”, select “Preferences” (in Mac), and navigate to the “File Types” tab. There you can mark or unmark the formats that are supported by Picasa which includes ram formats, .BMP, .GIF, .PNG, .PSD, .TIF/.TIFF, .TGA, Quicktime movies, and movies (.AVI, .WMV, .ASF, .MPG).

In addition, you can also obtain Picasa photos from different external sources as well. This includes cameras, CDs, memory cards, scanners, webcams, and many more. To acquire pictures from these devices, go to “File” and choose “Import From”, or you may also press Ctrl+M. Then pick the device where you intend to acquire the pictures from in the “Import from” dropdown menu. After that, specify the destination folder of the photos and also the folder title. Furthermore, you may also make Picasa delete pictures from the source device after copying them, which is a convenient feature for digital cameras.