I've been trying a lot of approaches but still didn't find any effective solution.
I want gigs of photos in a network drive (a IOMega Home Media Network Drive, plugged to my wifi router). I'd like to do 2 things:
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Do a Picasa import process of all the photos in the drive, making Picasa organize all the files in a year/month folder structure physically. Ideally, the import target directory should be the same network drive, otherwise I should move all the imported files in my local computer back to the drive myself.
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Share the Picasa database over the network, by uploading it to the network drive.
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Have me and other members of the family point our Picasas to the network database, and see the photos as well as make changes (tag faces, create logical albums, etc) into it.
Is ANY possibility to accomplish this? Or should I be looking for another photo management app, and in that case do you know such one?
Thank you!
Best Answer
PicasaStarter seems to be the only decent application addressing this major shortcoming of Picasa. Why Google won't address server/network abilities for Picasa is beyond me.
PicasaStarter is a small application that provides a solution for a number of shortcomings of Google's Picasa, the image organisation and editing application.
Picasa without PicasaStarter has the following limitations:
Picasa doesn't allow the database and pictures to be shared among different users (not on the same computer, not in a network).
By default, Picasa puts the Picasa database in the user's private Application Data folder which is on the C: drive.
You can only use/have one database per user, choosing between multiple databases is not possible.
PicasaStarter enhances Picasa and adds the following features:
You can create any number of Picasa databases and sets of pictures. This allows you to have separate pictures /database sets for different projects or uses. For instance separate databases for vacations, hobbies, and jobs.
Databases can be created in any location, including network drives, and can be shared by multiple computers and users.
It is very easy to create a portable solution where the pictures and database are on a portable or USB drive. The only thing that must be installed on the computer is Picasa itself. This makes it possible to show and work with your pictures on any computer.
You can create Shortcuts on your Desktop to start Picasa with each database. This gives one step access to any photo / database set.