Old Picasa

How to open PICASA files

• Old Picasa Files
• Recover Old Picasa Photos

If you cannot open the PICASA file on your computer - there may be several reasons. The first and most important reason (the most common) is the lack of a suitable software that supports PICASA among those that are installed on your device.

A very simple way to solve this problem is to find and download the appropriate application. The first part of the task has already been done – the software supporting the PICASA file can be found in the table. Now just download and install the appropriate application.

When it’s done scanning, you’re back at the standard Picasa Import screen. Click Import all. Select a folder to put it in. I made a folder called ‘Old Photos’ for the first one, then, for each subsequent scanned photo, I selected that existing folder from the drop-down list. I scanned 53 old photos in this manner.

Places: Picasa’s Places feature worked in one of two ways. The program could pull geotagging info from an image’s metadata if it was created by a phone or other GPS-enabled device, or, you. Moving On From Picasa. Google’s old picture-editing program has been retired, but other free desktop or browser-based programs might be able to fill the void.

Program(s) that can open the .PICASA file

Possible problems with the PICASA format files

The inability to open and operate the PICASA file does not necessarily mean that you do not have an appropriate software installed on your computer. There may be other problems that also block our ability to operate the file. Below is a list of possible problems.

• Corruption of a PICASA file which is being opened
• Incorrect links to the PICASA file in registry entries.
• Accidental deletion of the description of the PICASA from the Windows registry
• Incomplete installation of an application that supports the PICASA format
• The PICASA file which is being opened is infected with an undesirable malware.
• The computer does not have enough hardware resources to cope with the opening of the PICASA file.
• Drivers of equipment used by the computer to open a PICASA file are out of date.

If you are sure that all of these reasons do not exist in your case (or have already been eliminated), the PICASA file should operate with your programs without any problem. If the problem with the PICASA file has not been solved, it may be due to the fact that in this case there is also another rare problem with the PICASA file. In this case, the only you can do is to ask for assistance of a professional staff.

Similar extensions

How to associate the file with an installed software?

If you want to associate a file with a new program (e.g. my-file.PICASA) you have two ways to do it. The first and the easiest one is to right-click on the selected PICASA file. From the drop-down menu select 'Choose default program', then click 'Browse' and find the desired program. The whole operation must be confirmed by clicking OK. The second and more difficult to do is associate the PICASA file extension to the corresponding software in the Windows Registry.

Is there one way to open unknown files?

Many files contain only simple text data. It is possible that while opening unknown files (e.g. PICASA) with a simple text editor like Windows Notepad will allow us to see some of the data encoded in the file. This method allows you to preview the contents of many files, but probably not in such a structure as a program dedicated to support them.

If you use Picasa, the desktop based photograph management and uploading application from Google, you need to be aware that Picasa can lose images and folders from time to time. If you notice your pictures going missing in Picasa, first off, Don’t Panic!

Before We Continue – an Update

Google is dropping support for Picasa. You can keep using it, but if it goes wrong there’s nothing you can do. So here’s some options [taken from one of my replies in the comments below].

1. You could keep using Picasa until it stops working … Not ideal but it will work for a while.
   
2. Upload all your pictures to Flickr. Flickr online offers all the search, tagging and organizing into albums that Picasa does. And I think the new Flickr uploader works a bit like Dropbox, so you can create a basic folder structure on your computer to upload to Flickr. I say ‘I think’ because I haven’t tried the new uploader. I still use Flickr as one of my photograph backup sites (Dropbox is the other) but, see option 3. below
   
3. Adobe Lightroom. $9 per month (last checked October 2016), this has an in-built upload to Flickr. It allows you to tag, geotag, name people, add titles, descriptions, rate images and organize them into endless virtual albums, and export the pictures in lost of formats. It also includes a very comprehensive, non-destructive picture editor. Unfortunately it has a fairly steep learning curve. I love it and it handles my 25,000+ personal images with ease, and also some 10,000+ images I hold for a customer for whom I produce a print magazine. With Lightroom I import the images from the camera into a dated folder (Yearmonth) in Dropbox, and Export them to Flickr once I’ve processed the images. I shoot Raw and Lightroom handles Raw Files, so I no longer keep jpgs. I can produce a jpg whenever I want to any size I want. Since switching to Lightroom I’ve had very little use for Photoshop, except for producing original artwork.

Now if you want to try and fix your copy of Picasa – read on…

Check Your Hard Drive

The good news is that your pictures are probably all okay. Have a look around your hard drive – typically in a windows machine they’ll be in the ‘My Pictures’ folder unless you’ve elected to keep them somewhere else. And of course you keep back-ups?

I recommend Picasa to my customers, so I was rather concerned that pictures appeared to be going missing. Even more so when I started looking online and discovered this is fairly common, and the advice from Google is to uninstall Picasa and then re install it. This is fine if you haven’t been using Picasa’s virtual albums, or making use of Picasa’s rather uncanny face recognition software. In either case you’d need to start again from scratch. So I spent a couple of hours reading endless forums trying to find a solution that wouldn’t lose my albums. I’m not quite so worried about the people recognition, but it would be nice to keep that too.

Firstly my reading reminded me that Picasa unlike a lot of other Photo Organizing software actually deletes a picture or a folder if you ask it to do so. Some Photo Organizers just remove the image from the organizer’s database, leaving the original alone just in case it is needed.

So if your problem has been caused by some over enthusiastic use of the [dakey k=delete] button, go check in your system recycle bin (usually an icon or your desktop), and if you find your missing pictures, use the File Restore facility.

If that’s not your issue, and you can see your pictures in Explorer, but not in Picasa, then before you think about rebuilding your database, there is another check to make.

Check Picasa to make sure you haven’t hidden some folders

Have you accidentally removed the folder or file from the Picasa ‘Scan list’? In Picasa click on File and then select Add folder to Picasa…

Now check the list of folders for any that have a cross beside them. As you can see I don’t bother to get Picasa to look for photographs in some folders on my machine – mainly because I know these areas have duplicates at different sizes.

Rebuilding the Picasa Database without re-installing Picasa

If you haven’t hidden your folders, then it looks like rebuilding your database is going to be required. I found this great tip. There is a ‘secret’ key sequence you can use when starting Picasa that tells it to delete and rebuild the database. To work you must start Picasa from the Windows Start Menu or the Task bar. Hold down the [dakey k=Ctrl] [dakey k=Shift] and [dakey k=Alt] keys simultaneously and keep them held down while you click on the Picasa icon. When the following message appears you can let go of the keys.

Then all you have to do is sit back and wait… and wait… while it finds all your pictures, repopulates your Photo albums, and also (if you have Face recognition turned on) goes through and finds all the faces again. Unfortunately you may need to reconfirm those faces it has trouble recognizing. Picasa took between 1-2 hours to index my 33,000+ images.

Re installing Picasa — DON’T DO IT

Unless you have kept a copy of the install program do not uninstall Picasa. The install program is no longer available.

Old Picasa Files

There’s a Google Support page to tell you how to uninstall and re install Picasa. If you are reasonably technically savvy this blog post tells you what files to save to keep your albums so you can get them back when you re install Picasa.

Backing Up Your Pictures

External drives, SD Cards, DVDs all offer fairly easy ways of making back-ups – depending on how many pictures you have. I also keep copies of my pictures on-line in Flickr – you can have up to 1 terabyte free. Or as Flickr puts it:

[dacallout type=big]1 terabyte = 218,453 16.0 megapixel photos[/dacallout]

That’s quite enough space for most people!

The important thing is to make a copy. Also, remember to check that your back ups are okay, and make a new copy every now and then. Media deteriorates over time.

So, if your pictures are important make sure they are backed up. Especially before doing anything recommended above.

Do not rely on the likes of Facebook to keep copies of your pictures. Even if you tell Facebook to upload high quality images, it still only keeps fairly small (around 2,000 pixels maximum width or height), and quite highly compressed (low quality) versions. If you want to check how bad it is try uploading a picture showing black text against a red background.

Why Use Picasa Anyway?

I use Picasa for several reasons.

• Picasa lets you scroll through your pictures very quickly
• The Search functionality is very good especially if you tag your images
• Creating albums is very quick
• You can export images at different resolutions – which makes producing smaller images for websites a breeze. I used to use my Nikon Software to run a batch process to do this. Picasa does it much more quickly and easily.
• Automated Collage production. I use these a lot for posters and promotional materials.

I do not use Picasa to edit my pictures. For that I use a combination of Capture NX 2 and a now aging copy of Photoshop, which is all I need for the simple image fixes I perform. And I don’t use Picasa to embed the IPTC data. For that I use Nikon’s ViewNX 2, which also provides Geo-location data.

Recover Old Picasa Photos