1/7/2024 0 Comments Picasa 3for pcNow, we’re ready to rock and roll … Sharing Picasa Between Multiple User Accounts on the Same Computer I cannot provide individual support – you are welcome to comment / contribute below, and may get a response from another reader, but I can not make promises.I’m not a Windows Guru, and make no claims that this is the best or most elegant solution – just one that works for me.Even if everything works, there’s no way knowing if a future Picasa release will change it all….Before making any changes, do back up your Picasa database (both photos and the system data).These solutions work for me, but I can not guarantee they will work for you – experiment at your own risk.They should work on Vista, too, and I believe there is a logical equivalent under XP, but I’ve never checked it.I’ve tested the solutions below in Windows 7.Yes, there is one – keep on reading :-) But first some disclaimers: one that allows any member of the family (and any user account) using any computer on a network to share the one and only Picasa database – view and edit all the same, with any changes, tagging, editing immediately saved no matter which computer is being used. The safest way to avoid confusion and different views of the same photos was to make a policy of only editing images on the “main computer” where they were stored, thus rendering all other networked computers to passive viewers only. Cropping and some other information was still missing, so you could never be 100% certain you were looking at identical version of your images. Through a succession of new releases Google moved more information on user edits into the per-folder Picasa.ini files, so the system was able to rebuild the database almost completely. In this setup Picasa still had to index all images it read from the network and recreate a local database on the individual computers, so the solution was quite redundant – but worked relatively well. This could quite easily be done by mapping the main computer’s drive as a network drive, say P: (for Photos or Picasa), setting Picasa on all the satellite computers to forget the local Pictures folders and only scan the new P: drive. In the meantime wireless home networks became more robust, so instead of redundant chaos, the next best option was maintaining once central Picasa home-base, and accessing it from other computers via the network. It worked for a while… then I started to see corrupted databases, so I abandoned synchronization. The original concept in my previous guide was based on syncing the hidden Picasa databases between all computers involved. You will soon have multiple versions of the databases and sometimes of the images themselves, and that leads to chaos. This is actually a good concept, you can experiment and safely revert back to the original – trouble starts when you want to move to a new computer, or God forbid access your photos from multiple computers – some of the associated changes will come through, others won’t. Picasa does not save your edits in the image file itself, rather it uses a set of system files: picasa.ini files in every photo folder and a bunch of proprietary databases in two hidden system directories. It’s hard to believe that Google, an undeniably Web-centric company would create an application that’s designed to be used by one single user and one single computer – that’s stone-age vision, and again, is very antagonistic to being a visionary Web company. Or one of the computers I use – if only I could. Picasa is my favorite photo management program, and hey, it’s hard to beat free! Yes, I believe SaaS is the future of computing, and I do keep many photos online (just canceled Flickr Pro in favor of PicasaWeb), but quick-and-dirty manipulation of large image files en masse is still easier, faster on a local PC. I’ve long struggled trying to find a better solution… and now that I have it … drumroll … but wait, first things first: What’s the problem with Picasa? I can’t believe people actually read it today and try to follow the advice therein… it’s and OLD post with outdated information. My 4-year old how-to guide, Picasa Photo Sync on Multiple Computers has attracted tens of thousands of viewers, and is still quite popular.
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