Fugato

I’ve been trying to use Picasa2 for organizing my fledgling photo collection. It is marvellous in concept and very usable in practice, except for a nasty bug.

Here’s the bug: I create and assign labels to a bunch of pictures, then exit Picasa, then open it again, and the new label assignments are gone.

When I close Picasa I can see .PAL files being created in C:\Documents and Settings\Gulli\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Picasa2Albums\blahblah. Each .PAL file contains XML describing a label and referencing the photos having that label. Right until they are all deleted when I open Picasa again.

Here’s the workaround: point Picasa to my picture folder with “Scan Once” instead of “Watch for Changes.” Of course I lose the watch-for-changes feature. But my labels stick.

Here’s my guess: apparently when I start Picasa, “Watch for Changes” does not recognize my picture files as being the same ones it indexed previously … so it regards the previously-indexed files as “lost” (and thus throws away the label information associated with them) and indexes them again as if they were new. So labels are lost each time.

I don’t know why it would do that. I am running Windows XP for 64-bit systems, but I got this bug in my normal 32-bit XP installation too. I store my pictures on an internal drive, not a network share.

Is anyone else experiencing this?

So for now I won’t use “Watch for Changes.” Instead, I’ll import manually when I have new or changed pictures. And wait for Google to fix this in the next release. [In which I hope they will also add support for .CR2 files, the raw photo format from newer Canon EOS models. Won't they? Please?]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 14th, 2005 at 2:37 am and is filed under Misc, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.