Picasa team must be grumpy. Their baby has failed to thrive in Google’s cloud, the desire for images to be managed locally incompatible with Google’s dream. It took me a while to give up on it, I have 20K images, and I did not want the switching headache.
The lack of drag and drop integration really hurt while I was creating a photo book at Nation’s Photo Lab. I switched to Adobe Lightroom: nice folder browsing support, metadata are kept in XMP, an open standard. I’ve never been a fan of iPhoto/Aperture’s straightjacket.
To migrate, I needed to preserve Picasa’s image edits, and star ratings.
Image edits were a breeze: just click on “Save to disk” icon in every one of your folders.
Preserving star ratings took a bit of coding: I had to parse Picasa.ini files, detect the stars, and modify the file’s XMP metadata. I wrote a script that does this PicasaToXMP.py. Starting from the launch directory, it traverses all subfolders, finds all star-rated images, and gives them 5 stars in the format Lightroom recognizes. It won’t work on movies, and will write out all the failures in the error log, so you can fix this manually.
Before running the script, you need to install an exiv2 package from MacPorts. The script can easily be modified to deal with any other metadata stored in Picasa.ini.
Posting this just in case you’ve decided to switch, my Google search for this script turned up nothing.
I’m going through the same process at the moment – I have always used Picasa for cataloguing for the sheer speed of it. Editing has always been in photoshop, so no problems with edits, but losing the star ratings is a real problem. I’m still not 100% convinced i want to go to lightroom, it seems slow and clunky compared to picasa, as a catalogue…but i could really use the ability to batch edit raw, and heck, everyone keeps telling me that lightroom is what i need.
The only problem? I’m a windows user, not mac
But at least you’ve given me some ideas for how I might be able to achieve this with lightroom…Thanks!
can’t find the script anymore. can you please post it again? maybe put it on github.
The script got lost in the server migration. I’ve reposted the script on github. Thanks for the idea.
So how do you like the switch to Lightroom after all? I use both Picasa and Lightroom – for the same reasons as Kajo: speed. Picasa works decently well with my very large library on a remote file server over Samba (they seem to have some smart caching at work). Lightroom just cannot handle large images over a network share; it’s a dog (Picasa also is just so much more streamlined on the browsing side). So I use Picasa for cataloging and edit in Lightroom. Clunky setup so I’d really love to see Lightroom working better over the network…
Meh, not a big fan of Lightroom. Picasa’s UI is much nicer. I migrated because Picasa was giving me trouble with multiple users on remote when I was a Mac/PC household. It’ll probably work now that we are all Mac. I am sticking with Lightroom as a future hedge. Picasa stores metadata in a non-standard format, Lightroom follows the standard. Picasa development has slowed down a lot since Google’s acquisition, and I believe it’ll be abandoned, and then I’ll have to learn Lightroom anyway.