Un-Jumbling Picasa

Non Destructive Photo Editors, have an achilles’ heal. Whilst they don’t change the original file (some may make a copy of it) they normal have to store the procedure that was undertaken and this is typically stored in a datafile somewhere. It might be a sidecar style file (like lightroom’s .xmp format) or a in the same directory (like picasa’s ini file) or even in a master database (lightroom’s catalogues). Because these files are normally hidden then it is possible to miss a corruption and damaged data could easily get formally rolled into your backups and archives.

In the process of moving around a lot of my photos I started to noticed that on at least two of my computers that Picasa occasionally displayed the wrong thumbnail. Clicking on a photo might reveal something else. The full view was the correct photo but the thumbnail didn’t match. Pressing the Refresh Thumbnails in the folder View did fix this locally. However the more I looked the worse the mix ups became, what appeared to be folders of new photos seemed to have some old photos scattered around. then the thumbnails would change! It looked bad. Yet I didn’t panic I know enough about picasa to know the original photos would be untouched. What was happening was some kind of mixup in the linking to the photos. But what about all my editing, tagging, and geocoding. Time to tread warily.
Then I updated to version 3.9, build 136.20, and my main photographic machine would not load picasa at all. Looking at the release notes didn’t give me any hint of what was going on The thumbnail mix up just got worse and worse. Time to get serious.

Fixing the Mix Up

The Google Picasa Help, recommends a fairly drastic way to Rebuild your Picasa Database, if you follow this approach you should definitely backup your photos first (yes they do recommend that). Yet I was still not convinced I needed such a drastic measure!

A much gentler explanation and procedure to follow appears in Picasa Tutorials , under the post/tip by Chris Guld, When your pictures get "All Messed UP" however her first approach no longer works (at least in picasa 3.9). The second approach might sound a bit scary but it is actually easy just make sure you have closed picasa and rename the folder C:\Users\User\AppData\Local\Google\Picasa2 (replace User with your user name) to something else (like …\Google\Picasa_corrupt).  Notice I suggest renaming the folder not deleting it, this might be vedry important (see saving Face below).

Now is the time to follow the instruction to uninstall picasa, download the latest version and reinstall it. When picasa restarts it will set about recreating the database. This can take a long time! So I did it in two steps for the initial run as prompted I just guided picasa to look through my pictures directory only. Later I used the File/Add Folder to Picasa... menu to identify my external hard drive folders and selected just the folders containing my archived photos. Rather than having the scan always I selected these to be scanned once and also checked the face detection on for these folders

Picasa.ini to the Rescue

Picasa stores most of the actions you undertake on your photos in a hidden file called picasa.ini which is stored in the same folder (sub-directory as the photos). Mostly this is to do with how the photos has been edited and what process/filter has been applied. Details of which photos you have starred and any album you have chosen to also include that photo within. Some of this information is also stored in teh central data files but the picasa.,ini file remain a secondary location and when picasa is re-installed and begins reading through your directories it can use this information to recreate you views in picasa as before.
Simple example of what’s in a picasa.ini file

[Picasa]
name=2013-04-07
category=Folders on Disk
date=41371.460810
[IMG_0999.JPG]
backuphash=278
crop=rect64(25c10987c527f872)
filters=crop64=1,25c10987c527f872;

As I had extensively used staring and albums as part of my organizational tasks as I load new photos into picasa I was keen not to loose this information, and it was preserved. Also the geotagging information was actuall stored embedded into the EXIF metadata so it was also preserved.

Saving Face

The one thing that may be lost in the picasa database rebuild process is the identity of which face can be recognized in which photo. This is a bit complex because the recognition that a photo contains a face is stored in the picasa.ini file, but like the thumbnails the actual contact name is stored in the main database. Further with the google+ changes the way these names are synced is a bit different. So the good news is in theory if you have sync to the web ticked on the tools/people manger tab (shown here) then your contact information will already be synced to gmails and/or google+. However what if they aren’t? Great Aunt Mable probably doesn’t have an email address anyway. That is why it was better to rename the picasa2 folder, because all your names can still be accessed in the file called contacts.xml. You just need to copy this back into the new folder once it is set up (ie soon after picasa start searching your computer for folders). As this process progressed I noted that under 3.8 build 136.20 where the person is identified by you, their name with their email address when defined, is now included under the new [contacts2] label in the picasa.ini file. So Maybe these hassle can be avoided in the future.

It  has actually taken me a few days (mainly taken up as picasa trawled my directories and photo storage location on external hard drives) but I am now confident I don’t have any more funnies in my photo collection. My confidence in picasa as a reliable non-destructive Photo Organizer has been restored.
So in the words of the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy Don’t Panic.

Saving face, after a picasa database corruption

I spent a lot of last weekend carefully timing how long it took various programs to load my photos from cards. Picasa was the outstanding performer by now it has let me down badly. It refuses to start on my main photographic computer at all just giving me this error message and if I say yes, reporting an error with that specific file.

I have picasa on several other computers and two of them, both updated last week are showing occasional signs of corrupted data base problems (ie they often display the wrong thumbnails for recently uploaded photos. This has a frequently report problem since 3.8 but something has clearly made this worse on my computers. I suspect the 3.9 update. The recommended way to fix a corrupted database in picasa is to firstly delete picasa and then reinstalled the software a fresh. Yes that’s what it recommends!

This is fine for most features because the editing processes for your photos are actually stored in the picasa.ini files that are located in the same directory as the photos. the central databases just storing a thumbnail of the photo and its location, EXCEPT for some details if you are using face detection feature and any albums you have used. The flag that a photo might contain a face is stored in picasa.ini file BUT the detail of who is who (ie the names you have given the face are actually stored in . I suggest you might want to read the well prepared tutorial "Saving Faces When you Re-Install Picasa"

As I am in the middle of rethinking how and where I storing my working copies and archives I figure now is a good time to bit the bullet and re-installed picasa a fresh and get it to re-index only the photos and directories I want. I guess if it all goods well you probably won’t hear more in here BUT I am a little worried its going to be more complex than that! Things didn’t great off to a great start, when I tried to report why I was uninstalling picasa, I repeated got the following error!

See also my Un-Jumbling picasa update

Microsoft Research’s AutoCollage

Those who may have read my blog previously will know I like making photo collages, often in picasa but I’m open to any good collage tool. Autocollage works are something I first saw on Flickr, and didn’t realise at the time it was another microsoft reseach project (PhotoSynth & ICE are two others I have discussed before). These collages at first appear like very professional graphic artistry and beautifully “seamless” but they are really cleverly blended image segments, that any of us can create with relatively little effort (ok you need to take some good photos first).

It works best with photos of family and friends, say on special occasions. It has been built around a robust multi-pose face recognition system (yes it does sound a bit big brother-ish). The Collage construction is automatic and first looks for the most interesting photos, and particularly clear face shots and the regions of interest (thats ROI Optimization to researchers) with a constraint satisfaction optimization (lost you yet, it means it is trying to pack as many ROI into the collage space as efficiently as possible. A really smart cut-paste system called grab-cut (or as it is know to researches, Image Segmentation with A Bounding Box Prior) then selects the key parts of those ROI and finally a neat blender algorithm that solves a linear system of Poisson Equation to get seamless pastes the segments into the full collage image. Simple really! Well it is to use.

I make a point of not posting links to “hostage”ware (software you can download and use once or twice but then it demands payment) but this download is clearly a 30 day free trial. You do however get a big watermark across the bottom of each image generated with the trial version.

Windows Live Update 2011, still fast

Windows Live 2011 update has already arrived in my computer, as an important update within the microsoft automated updates. Other than being a few months early (its still 2010 on my calendar) and only a few months after the last update I figured I probably should install and review it because it is the first non-beta version. Once the new Photo gallery was run it asked me again to download two codecs to be able to display RAW formats from my camera. The previous update had also ask for exactly the same updates and I thought I had installed them correctly, obviously not. Lets hope it works this time.

I actually I can not see a lot different to the recent beta update (it could be identical) it is still amazingly fast.


A big new feature I didn’t discuss before, is the face recognition, and particularly the batch people tagging which is simple, fast and efficient. Its accurate, except for baby and bride photos. A phenomena I had already noticed to myself in picasa’s face recognition. In my family at least cousins and old photos of their parents and even old photos of their grandparents as kids get muddle up a lot and each kid probably has two or three groups for them at different baby/toddler ages. An even stranger effect is with bribes. Whilst female family and friends have their own large clusters in the day to day photos, they will always have a different cluster for their wedding day. Does this mean the current state of face recognition thinks we all marry someone different on our wedding day.

At the more mundane level photo gallery does give you the right range of ways to organize your photos, ie by time, people,subject(tagging), rating and/or place (geotagging). At the moment only picasa also offers this flexibility (ok the old HP photo manager, now defunct, also had similar aspirations). Most of us are now collecting a large mass of digital photos probably rivaling iTunes if not exceeding it as the biggest disk space hog on our computer and it is very unlikely that we are keeping that collection organized. The traditional photo organizers, from Photoshop to the ones supplied with your camera are groaning, becoming sluggish if not failing under this glut. Combining the Organize features and Quick Find, right beside each other on the ribbon menu, will soon put you back in control.

If you want to get the latest version of Windows Live Essential 2011 use this link. You can just download the Photo gallery if you don’t want the other utilities. By the Way Windows 7 no longer includes utility photo manager or movie maker software in the operating system bundle, so it you are using windows 7 you probably should download it if you haven’t been encourage to do it yet.