Category Archives: Short-Cuts

Making Picasa Work on a NAS or Shared Drive

The biggest problem I’ve had with Picasa has been my inability to connect and use it with a NAS or Network Attached Storage.

We’ll it’s not like I couldn’t use it, but if I lost connectivity my local database went away. All my albums and thumbs were gone and I had to rebuild it.

This happened enough because I was either disconnected, switched to a WiFi Network, or left the house with Picasa still open. All while inadvertent completely messed up my photo libraries. So How did I solve it?

From the command line with Git. (Git is a versioning control software). Steps:

  1. Find the Picasa Internal Database Location. (Usually in c:\Users\username\AppData\local\Picasa?? or /Users/username/Library/Application Support/Google/Picasa3)
  2. Go to this directory after git is installed and type:
git init .
git add .
git commit -m 'adding picas to master'
git checkout -b nas

The last line creates a branch called ‘nas’, which allows you to create multiple Picasa databases by just switching branches.

Now I did a test I disconnected my NAS folder restarted Picasa and everything went away. I closed down Picasa, did a ‘git reset –hard’, started Picasa, and everything was back the way it should be.

The only downside is that your git repository takes up about 70% the space as your Picasa library folder, but it still beats storing your photos locally.