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Monday, November 29, 2010

Picasa database broken - How to fix

Tried to look for photo for Christmas Card, but Picasa had corrupted it's database, so I had to un-install and re-install.

Did this twice as first time I had taken the option not to delete database, hoping it may fix without losing any of my previous settings. It did not. On restart Picasa found all my photos and rebuilt database OK but I did lose Albums which is just a logical collection of photos.

The keywords were all OK. This is because the keywords are written to the meta data of each photo. Picasa edit commands are kept in each folder in the Picasa.ini file so these are OK but I always export final photos to consolidate edits into normal jpg.

Note. If like me you use Photoshop Elements and/or Lightroom to do your key wording make sure you write these to photos. There are options in both products to do this, but it is easy to forget I would like to know if you can make this a default anywhere. If you use Picasa to add keywords these are automatically added to photo metadata.