Tips: Work with Picasa without loss

We test the free Picasa image management software with a couple of dark and oblique holiday images: We change the brightness, rotate the horizon and cut edge. Picasa shows the photos now improved, and so they appear in the Picasa slide show. But look directly into the folder of your operating system, ie into the Windows file explorer or the finder on the Mac: Directly in the folder display one sees the photo files further uncorrected, ie oblique and dark, without the Picasa editing >

1. Look at the folder


The explanation: Picasa "remembers" the corrections only "as math" in a new small file called.picasa.ini. Picasa shows your photos, but the hard drive still contains the original files.


2. Undo


Tip: In Picasa, right-click the folder name on the left of the program, then select "Search for disk." This image folder appears in the File Explorer or the Finder.


3. Export


After you restart Picasa, you can also reset your images: Double-click on a Picasa in Fotasa - you end up with the last correction. For example, you can change the contrast or cropping, and then use the previous interventions. Right-clicking on a thumbnail, the "Undo all edits" command appears. After a warning, Picasa will display the original image again.


4. Save photos to disk


Tip: You can also select multiple images and then reset them together.


Until now, the changes are only visible in Picasa. However, if you want to send the photos to friends or to an exposure service, the files themselves have to play all the changes. Take the "File, Export Image to Folder" command. This creates new file variants with all Picasa corrections. You can also calculate the exported variants, for example for e-mails.


Tip: If you want to re-write all images in the folder, select all recordings or none at all. If only a few images are selected, Picasa will only recreate these images.


Picasa shows the "Save edited photos to disk" button over the thumbnails of a folder. Now the files are also corrected directly in their folder. But the originals are still not gone: Picasa packs the old file versions into a new hidden folder called.picasaoriginals. With these hidden originals, the original files can still be restored.


Tip: If you do not see the hidden folder at first, for example, in Windows 7, select "Organize" and then "Folder and search options", go to the view register


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After saving photos to disk (step 4), Picasa provides Restore from the File menu. Here you have two possibilities


Restore: Picasa presents the uncorrected originals, all changes are lost.


Undo Save: The image appears to be corrected, but the hard disk will return to the original, old versions. Picasa empties the reserve folder.picasaoriginals but does not delete it.


5. Restore


Tip: Sometimes, Picasa does not correctly display restored photos. Then, right-click in the blank area next to a thumbnail, and then click Update Thumbnails. If it does not improve, restart the program.