Comments on: New Computing: Picasa’s Flaws

By: Leonard

Leonard — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 15:10:00 +0000

Well I use flickr and picasa extensively. I also take the route: No labels in picasa, edit, export, flickr.uploadr, tagging in flickr.
It’s not perfect, but since Picasa looses my labels all the time (My Networkdrive with the fotos is a bit flaky), I stopped doing more than editing, Folder-Organizing in picasa.

By: Jaykul

Jaykul — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 21:09:36 +0000

Actually, Picassa’s albums (which they confusingly call labels in the UI) are the equivalent of Flickr’s “sets,” but they’re not stored in a proprietary format. They’re stored in plain old XML. They’re in the your user profile’s “Local Settings” folder, something like: C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Picasa2Albums\[Huge Random Seed]\

If you look there, you should see a bunch of .pal files, which are just plain XML files, containing a root picasa2album tag and a few property tags including the name of the album, and then a files collection enumerating all the images that belong to that album.

Anyway. Monitoring one of them for Flickr uploading is fairly simple, and checking them all to see what other sets each photo is in is fairly simple too … and the “captions” which Flickr calls “descriptions” are embedded in the actual image file in an IPTC annotation, and Flickr’s “star” is stored in the Picasa.ini file in the folder with the image.

The real problem is that Picasa doesn’t seem to actually store the edited images at all (since Picasa 2?), preferring to store the edits they do as instructions in the Picasa.ini file. So unless you want to upload the un-edited image, you’re actually forced to export them, unless you can find a way to turn this into actual instructions:
filters= crop=1,264,256,1372,995; enhance=1; autolight=1; finetune=1,0.000000,0.000000,0.000000,fff3f4ef,0.000000;

By: ~Brian

~Brian — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 17:47:00 +0000

Nice summation of all the compatibility problems. I currently have both Picasa and Flickr in heavy use, and do my best to make them work together. I hate that I have to tag/label everything twice … once in Picasa and once in Flickr. In fact, I no longer tag in Picasa … I search for the files in Flickr, find the dates/filenames, then use those to find it in Picasa. The Flickr tag is a great idea, though I’m sure there could be other ways to implement a ‘pipeline’.

Anyway, the labels are stored in a proprietary Picasa database, which I’ve not read of anyone being able to hack yet. Jason brings up a good point, except his method loses all the relevant info tied to the images.

Finally, I always think of Picasa labels matching to Flickr tags, not Flickr sets. The way you describe using them to label all of the people in a photo, etc., makes me think of them more as tags. I guess this point is still open to debate, though.

I hope someone creates this API-pipeline soon … I scan the web every few weeks looking for one, but nothing yet….

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 21:56:02 +0000

Actually, uploading pictures from Picasa to Flickr is very simple and can already be done. At the bottom of your Flickr home page is a link called “Upload-by-email.” Click on that link and it’ll tell you the e-mail address you need to use to automagically upload your files from Picasa.

By: Jaykul

Jaykul — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 05:49:50 +0000

Actually, I’m kind-of looking into it. There’s no way to actually write a plugin for Picasa — they haven’t published an API — however, they do create a Picasa.ini file in each folder, and although I can’t tell right away where they store the “label“s, they have a “star” feature, and THAT is stored in the ini file (so I could use that as a way to detect which files should be uploaded). And the captions are actually put into the image as IPTC data.

Of course, the bummer is that all the “edits” you do to the image aren’t actually real unless you export (they don’t actually make a copy of the original as I said about, they simply don’t change it, all the edits are in memory only, as far as I can tell. That is, they don’t touch the original file, they simply make a note of what edits you’ve done, in the .ini file.

By: eikonos

eikonos — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 02:50:07 +0000

I totally agree with your point about computing being for the users, not for ‘cool new tech’.

In regard to the Picassa/Flickr pipe, is it possible, and have you considered writing a plugin application to do that for you?