Managing your Photos using Picasa [Mac OS X]

I have previously showed you how to organize your photos and videos and how to download them from your different devices. Now that you have your photos on your computer, I am going to show you how to manage and upload them.

As I have said several times, I do not like iPhoto. As a bit of a photohog, I find iPhoto does not provide me the flexibility I require to manage my photos and videos. So I use a great free program from Google called "Picasa".

Setup

To get things started, download and install Picasa (click here).

Once Picasa is installed, open it up.

When you open Picasa for the first time the program will start going through your entire file system and looking for all photos and videos. We want to stop Picasa from doing this.

So as soon as Picasa opens, click on "Tools > Folder Manager..."

Next, one by one, select the folders and drives that show up on the left hand side and click the "Remove from Picasa" option on the right hand side. A red X should display next to all the folders and drives, like this:

If you read and followed my advice on how to organize your photos, you will have a "Photos" folder (or some other similar name) somewhere in your file system.  Find it on the left hand side of Folder Manager and then select the "Scan Always" option on the right hand side.  Then click "OK".

Basically, we are telling Picasa that this is the only location we want it to look for photos and videos.

Picasa will now import all the events that you have saved in the Photos folder. Depending on the size of your photo library, this may take a few minutes to complete.

And with that, Picasa is set up and ready to go.

In this next post I will show you how to upload your photos online to back them up and if you want, to share them with family and friends.