Is there way to make all Picasa data/metadata portable

picasa

I would like to be able to have "identical" Picasa installs on two (or more) PCs. Essentially my use case is this:

I want to bring my hard drive with a large number of photos away with me, plug it into my laptop which has Picasa installed, and make albums, star photos, etc.. Then I want to plug it into my desktop at home, and see those same albums & stars that I created on the laptop.

I guess this means either:
a) having all metadata stored on the external drive, or
b) coming up with a reasonable process to transfer metadata between machines whenever I do something on one of them

As far as I know, by default, metadata is split between the install directory (e.g. c:/program files/…) and the directory where the photos actually are. Any suggestions?

Best Answer

I do this with Picasa on my Windows XP ( Notebook and Desktop)

  1. Make sure Picasa is closed

  2. On Windows XP I went to the following directory:

    C:\Documents and Settings[user profile name]\Local Settings\Application Data\Google

  3. Copy the following directories to another location (eg external Hard drive):

    Picasa2
Picasa2Albums

  4. Copy over your photo folder (in my case it was in c:\my documents\my photos) to your external hard drive.

To restore on the second PC:

*Download and install the same version of Picasa you used on the first PC:

  1. On the second PC open the following directory:

    C:\Documents and Settings[user profile name]\Local Settings\Application Data\Google

  2. Copy over the (Picasa2 / Picasa2Albums folders) to this directory.

  3. Copy over your photo folder to the same location (e.g. c:\my documents\my photos)

  4. Start Picasa.

You should have a duplicate copy of your Picasa setup.

Remember to only use one version to update and add photos and then repeat the process above.

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