Photo Downloading and Organization in Picasa 2

This hands-on exercise illustrates the basic process of using Picasa to download pictures from a Photo CD onto your hard disk and organize them into named folders.

1. Launch Picasa (double-click on the Picasa icon on the desktop).

2.  Insert the Photo CD disk (not the Digital Imaging disk) into the CD-ROM drive.

3.  Click once on the Import button in the upper left corner of the Picasa window. 

4. Downloading should begin automatically. Tiny thumbnails of the pictures will show in the panel on the left as they download.  (If the pictures don't begin to download automatically, click once on the Select Device button in the upper left and select CD Drive).

5. When the download is complete (the little thumbnails stop appearing), click once on the green Finish button at the bottom of the window.

6.  In the "Finish Importing" window, type a title for this group of pictures - something related to the subject matter of the pictures. There particular pictures were taken at the Folklife Festival at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, so I suggest something like that.  The more words the better (it's easier the find them later in a keyword search). 

7. Click once on the Finish button at the bottom of the "Finish Importing" window.  Picasa shows the "Library" view, with the new folder that you just created at the very top of the folder list.

8.  Picasa has put all the pictures that we just downloaded into one folder (located in My Documents\My Pictures), but actually there were three different occasions where these photos were taken:

7/6/2002       Folklife Festival at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
10/17/2004   Brookside Gardens, Silver Spring, MD
10/24/2004   Sunset in Naples, FL

To keep our photo collection better organized, we should split these pictures into three different folders, each named for the occasion.  That will make the pictures easier to find in the future.

9. Click once on the first thumbnail. When you do so, look at the blue bar at the bottom of the thumbnail library.  It shows the date when that particular pictures was taken - in this case on 7/6/2002.  Now press the right arrow key on the keyboard to move to the next picture.  

10. Keep looking at the date and pressing the right arrow key until the date changes. That means you have another set of pictures taken on another date - in this case on 10/17/2004. Right-click on the first picture with the new date and select Split Folder Here.  Type a title for this set of pictures (in this case Brookside Gardens, Silver Spring, MD) and click the OK button.

11. Click once on the first thumbnail in the new folder. Repeat step 10 to split out the next set of pictures, dated 10/24/2004, taken in Naples FL.

12. Remove the photo CD disk and return it to the instructor.

Note: if you were downloading from a digital camera (connected to the computer with a USB cable) or from a memory card reader, in step 4 you would click the Select Device button and then select the camera or the card reader from the list. The other steps are the same. 

(c) Tom O'Haver, November 2, 2005