#PICASA FOR MAC COMPUTERS HOW TO#
#PICASA FOR MAC COMPUTERS SOFTWARE#
#PICASA FOR MAC COMPUTERS WINDOWS#

It behooves you to understand exactly how they are stored on your computer. I will concede that Picasa is not blameless in these car wrecks – see my past article “Picasa, I Love You … Now Change! – but these are your precious pictures.

I know so many people that thought Picasa stored those pictures in the Album, so they deleted the pictures from their original folders. This is a wonderful feature but only if you understand what it’s doing. It can show you groups of pictures that are gathered from multiple folders and make them appear to be in one folder all together – it calls that an ‘Album.’ But an album only contains pointers to the actual pictures that still reside in your computer’s folders. Picasa also has capabilities that your files and folders system doesn’t have. That’s the car wreck! Now your original photos are gone … and you blame Picasa. I’ve heard this tale too often, where people mistakenly choose the originals to delete rather than the resized-for-web duplicates because they didn’t check the folder locations. If you don’t understand folders, you may decide to delete duplicates.

If you understand those folders, you will simply tell Picasa not to show the resized-for-web folder, or the backup folder, by using Picasa’s Folder Manager to exclude them. It will also show you the copies of those wedding pictures that you resized for using on the Web and put in the My Documents/Blog/ folder and the backup copies you have stored on an attached USB drive. Picasa will show you the folder of original wedding pictures that you stored in the My Pictures folder. You might assume (there’s that word again!) that Picasa is showing you just the My Pictures folder – that is where all your pictures should be, right? For example, it will search your entire computer for pictures and then display them all for you to see in it’s ‘Library.’ You don’t have to know where on your computer any picture exists to be able to see that picture in Picasa. Picasa (and all modern software) tries to hide some of the complexity of files and folders. You’re going to have a wreck!” How Picasa Works “Trying to organize your pictures using Picasa w ithout first understanding your computer’s filing structure is like trying to drive a car without first understanding the rules if the road. Nowadays people just dive right in and start clicking away! But, I’m here to tell you that it is important to understand the basics! There is no similar class/test for your first computer. But, if you got your first computer in the 21st century, it’s very possible that you skipped right over all that basic stuff! Before you’re allowed to drive a car, you have to take driving classes and pass a test showing that you understand the rules of the road.

#PICASA FOR MAC COMPUTERS HOW TO#

You all know what happens when we assume right?(we make an ‘ass’ of ‘u’ and ‘me’) It’s like we are teaching how to take the short cuts to drive to your destination without realizing that the student didn’t yet know how to drive.įor those of us who started with computers back in the DOS days, it’s hard to understand *not* knowing about files and folders.

We finally realized that we were assuming people understood how their computer stores files in folders and how to view and understand that folder structure, all we were teaching is how Picasa works with pictures in their computer’s folders. Yet, after every class, after every seminar, and after every article, we still get questions like, “How do I use Picasa without duplicating all the Pictures in My Pictures?” or “I only wanted a few pictures in Picasa, so I deleted the rest, why did Picasa delete them from my Hard Drive?” or “If I lose some photos from my computer but they are in Picasa can I retrieve them from Picasa?” We weren’t born knowing this stuff! We’ve written articles about it, we’ve recorded videos to explain it, we’ve taught it in hands-on classes and in seminars for hundreds of people all across the country. We’ve said those words literally thousands of times in teaching Picasa over the last 6 years.

“Picasa does not store your pictures, it is a tool for working with the pictures that exist in your computer’s folders.”

#PICASA FOR MAC COMPUTERS SOFTWARE#

Picasa is software that sits on top of the files and folders.

#PICASA FOR MAC COMPUTERS WINDOWS#

In Windows it’s called ‘ Explorer’, in Macintosh it’s called ‘ Finder.’ It’s the computer’s way of storing and organizing files and folders.

Picasa for mac computers