Q&A: How Do I Add Photos Already On My Storage Drives Into Picasa? (Video)
A lot of people have photos stored in folders on their storage drives, so it makes sense that if you’ve never used a photo manager before, they can seem a little daunting as far as understanding how they interact with your photos already being stored on your computer.
In this Q&A-style tutorial video, I answer a question I received from a reader of Scan Your Entire Life on how Picasa fundamentally works to select which photos on your internal or external storage drives are used inside of the application.
Basically, I feel what's in this video is the most important thing to understand in order to get the most out of Picasa.
Check it out.
Curtis,
Thank you for the recent newsletter on storing your photos. I am going to use Picasa or Windows Photo Manager (where most of my photos are now), but my question relates to how the photo manager software interacts with external hard drives for storage.
I know this may sound elementary, but I'm a bit confused by it. If I'm organizing photos in Picasa, how do they get from Picasa to the external hard drive? And once they are there, how do I retrieve them back into Picasa to further organize, add to, delete, etc.?
I know I can import them into my photo editing software (I use several different ones), but I just can't get my head around the connection and interaction between the organizing software.
There is probably some very simple answer to this, and I'm stupidly missing something, but I thought since you store your photos on external hard drives, you could guide me in the right direction.
Any thoughts or help much, much appreciated.
Ron Thoman
Topics Covered
- How Picasa's internal database is different from most other photo managers
- Basic import settings option asked when Picasa is first installed
- Using “File Explorer” to see folders on your storage drive with photos being managed inside of Picasa
- Understanding the basics of Picasa's “Folder Manager” window
- How “Scan Always” is the secret weapon that's unique to Picasa
- How the “Scan Once” function works
- How Picasa can automatically add photos you've added to watched folders
- How Picasa can automatically remove photos you've removed from watched folders
- The limitation and benefit of “Scan Once” watch folders
- How to import photos the traditional import method
- How to automatically watch external hard drives
- How to move folders of photos to other collections inside of Picasa
- Basic idea how to move your master images around on your storage drives while inside Picasa
Video Notes
Google's Picasa — Learn about and download the latest version of Picasa (Free)
Windows Photo Gallery — This wasn't demoed in the video, but Ron did mention it in his question, so I thought I would link to it as well for anyone interested in trying it out that doesn't already have it installed.
Alright, lastly, as always, if you have any questions I didn't answer in the video or in these notes below, please feel free to ask them below as well, and I will do my best to answer them for you.
Cheers!