Using Picassa

[genthon]

Can aynone help? I seem to have lost photos from Picassa. Someone on AB recommended Picassa recently. I installed it and thought it was great because it was easy to use. I downloaded loads of photos from discs (where I had previously stored them using a stand alone photo printer.) I then moved Picassa to an add on hard drive. I then spent many happy hours sorting my photos on Picassa. Yesterday I downloaded photos to a memory card to play on a digital photo frame so all was ok then. Today I found that many of my folders have disappeared from Picassa and others are on the add on hard drive but no longer in Picassa folder!! I am totally flummoxed! I had someone check over my pc today to improve performance but the add on drive where the photos are stored was not included in this. Could what was done have affected it? Incidently my pc performance has improved dramatically!!

[rojash]

Picassa doesn't actually store your pictures; Windows does that. Picassa just acts as a catalogue system (with a few fancy extras).
When you disconnect and reconnect a removable drive, you can't guarantee that it will always be assigned the same drive letter by Windows (it depends what other removable storage you connect, and the order in which you connect it).

It's possible that the removable drive has now been assigned a different letter from the one it had when Picassa catalogued the photos. If that's the case, then the pictures will still be there, but Picassa will no longer know where to find them.

Try connecting only the drives that were present when you catalogued the photos, and restarting the machine.

You can tell Windows the letters that you wish to assign to a particular drive as follows:
Right-click My Computer (Computer under Vista or Win7)
Choose Manage
On the left, click storage/Disk Management
On the right, locate the external drive and Right-click
Choose Change Drive letter and paths.

[bibblebub]

Use the Add Folder To Picasa option in the File Menu to bring up the Folder Manager in which you can see what drives/folders it thinks are present.

[genthon]

Have just found out that even though I have moved Picassa and all my photos to my add-on hard drive I still need to keep all my photos on the C drive for my folders to appear in Picassa. Problem solved!