If you use Picasa to organize your pictures you may or may not be aware of the various options available to you to add your pictures to Picasa. Below I will walk you through four scenarios to teach you how you can add pictures to Picasa from your computer, your camera, and the web. If you have any comments or questions please post them below.
Import Pictures from Your Camera, Memory Stick, and Other Removable Devices
To import photographs from your digital camera, scanner, or removable media, follow the instructions below.
1. Click the Import button located on the top left of the screen.
2. The Import tab will open. Click on the Select Device drop-down to choose the device to import from. In this example I will be importing photographs from a Secure Digital (SD) card.
Soon after the device is selected Picasa will look at the contents of the device and list all of the pictures contained within. Picasa provides users several options when importing photographs. Users have the option of importing only selected pictures or all pictures listed. Picasa allows you to preview the photographs to be imported with the Preview pane on the right of the screen. Use the arrows to move through the pictures and the Rotate arrows to correct picture orientation prior to importing.
Another neat feature is the ability to select the photographs based on the date. Notice that Picasa segments the photographs based on the time period they were taken in. Each grouping is denoted by the clock icon. When importing pictures you can instruct Picasa to exclude duplicates by adding a check mark to the Exclude Duplicates check box.
3. When you are ready to import your pictures, click on Import All or Import Selected (#) to bring your pictures to Picasa.
4. When you import photos to Picasa you are provided with a series of options to customize the folder the pictures you are importing will be stored in. Name the folder, select a location to copy the files to, add the location where the pictures were taken, add a date, a description and click Finish when you are done.
Note: The more details you provide for your pictures and the folder you are creating, the easier it will be to locate the pictures in the future.
Recently imported photographs displayed in new folder.
Add Picture Folders to Picasa
1. Click on File > Add Folder to Picasa
To add an existing folder containing pictures to Picasa follow the instructions below.
2. The Picasa Folder Manager window will open. Choose the folder you would like to add and click on Scan Once or Scan Always to add the folder to Picasa. Click OK to proceed.
Note: To get a better understanding of the Folder Manager, read the following article – How to Control Which Folders Picasa Scans Automatically
The folder that was added should appear in Picasa.
Add Individual Pictures to Picasa
To add an individual picture to Picasa follow the instructions below.
1. Click on File > Add File to Picasa
2. Locate and select the picture you wish to add to Picasa and click Open.
Individual picture added to Picasa will appear within the folder it is physically stored.
Import Pictures from Web Albums to Your Computer
If you’ve uploaded pictures to Picasa Web Albums from other computers and would like to save those pictures to your computer, follow the instructions below.
1. Click on File > Import from Web Albums
2. If you would like to import all photographs from the Web Albums website add a check mark to the Import all albums… check box. If you would like to specify which folders to import, remove the check mark. Click OK when you are done.
All or selected folders will be downloaded from Picasa Web Albums to your computer.
Article posted on 08 27th, 2009
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Id like to suggest this method of saving pictures in Picasa: label each set of pictures by the year first, space, then month date, space, then subject, as in
09 11 Venice.
The pictures will line up neatly in order. It’s much easier to find pictures this way. If you have two different subjects in one month, add the day date after the month date, before the subject title.
It’s best to download pictures as you go along, daily if needed, so you can keep your folders separate.
When I get pictures in g-mail, I would like them to be saved in picasa, and not elswere in my pictures in my laptop.
How can I associate saving all pictures from e-mail or any other source with picasa. That is the only picture program I want to use. When I right click on the picture picasa is not an option
@Robin Collins: Aside from Picasa I also use Lightroom and that is one of my favorite features, the ability to automatically name files and folders based on a flexible set of parameters.
I do agree with you that some kind of organization method is necessary in order to be able to identify pictures. Thank you for the great tip.
@gab: When you say that you are saving to Picasa is not entirely an accurate statement. All Picasa does is reference the pictures stored in your computer. So I’m not sure what you are trying to accomplish. The pictures have to be saved in your computer in order for Picasa to see them.
Please help me understand, perhaps I misunderstood your question. Thank you.
What @gab obviously meant (and clearly without knowing deeply about what he is talking) is that he wants to press “Save” in gmail and when he opens picasa, there are the saved photos.
That’s simple.
You need to choose your browser’s default download location to be the one of the Picasa’s watched folders. But I won’t try to guess which browser you use or which folders you’ve got.
@Caue – You are correct, this is the way to save images from the web, but I thought gab wanted a way to automatically save to Picasa Web Albums and keep the files (pictures) off the computer…We’ll see what she says. Thanks for helping others.
Hi Caue Rego, I am gab (Gabriella) I have vista home premium 64 bit. You say I need to choose your browser’s default download location to be one of Picasa’s watched folders. HOW DO I DO THAT?
I know nothing from nothing, would you give me step by step directions, because indeed I would like to r-click on my picture in g-mail, and download it directly to Picasa. I don’t want it on the ‘my pictures’ folder. thank you for helping me. Gabriella
A well organized and informative site for easy enhancement with pictures.
Gab,
Just save the email pictures the way you have been doing. and I assume that you know in which folder they are stored, otherwise you would not be able to view them again. (Possibly the “my pictures” folder.)
Then you tell picasa where they are:Open Picasa, in upper left corner…
File-> Add folder to Picasa->: then select i.e.
C:\Documents and settings\My Documents\My pictures\ and on that same window select that you want Picasa to always scan this folder. Then click OK.
Dear Keas, thank you so much for all your help. Yes, I have been szving it in ‘my pictures’ and you thought me how to transfer it into picassa. I printed out your help. You are much appriciated. It is perfect. From picasa I can edit, e-mail, and have no more problems. I feel lucky for finding you. Gabriella
My Granddaughter has posted some awesome photos of my Great-Grand Kids (her babies) on her Facebook page. I would like to capture those images into Picasa 3, if there is a method. You seem to be rather more knowledgeable of Picasa than most people to whom I have mentioned this; please advise !!
Thank You
@R. Michael Gard – The best thing to do is right-click on the image from within your browser and save it to a directory on your computer. I’m not familiar with a plugin or application that will automatically allow you to download pictures from Facebook. I would also suggest getting a hold of your granddaughter to see if she can upload the pictures to http://picasaweb.google.com/home using this website you can automatically download to Picasa.
Let me know if this all make sense and if you need any help. Thank you for your comment.
Yeah, Keas gave a much better idea. Sorry I didn’t notice there were answers and questions followed by mine until now, accidentally searching for other things on google.
While I do find both ideas kinda bad because either way pictures and any other downloaded files will all be going to the same place (directory / folder) and it will easily become a mess, there’s no big harm and you can always use many different ways to organize and find information nowadays anyway.
Like many people, I’ve got way too used to simply download to a default place and manually move the files to where I want to, because I’m way too used to organize through the file system legacy.
If you use Firefox as a web browser, or maybe even the new Google Chrome, you can find some plugins / add-on / extensions that will allow you to choose different places to automatically save different kinds of files. But images can be photos or not, and I also download other kinds of images, so this would still not be a good solution for me. And so there goes the manual way again.
Sorry again for been too dispersive.
Since Picasa mirrors your computer "My Picture" files/folders, I would like to know what is the best way to label them in My Pictures so that way they are not a mess in Picasa.
I seem to have quite a mess going and now I am not sure how to straighten it out. I do genealogy and I really want all of my folders in My Pictures and Picasa to be very organized…any suggestions?