Google Tutor

The Coolest New Picasa’s Photo Importing Feature

Posted: 28 Oct 2009 06:00 AM PDT

Picasa 3.5 comes with a few cool new features. One of them is face tagging, where Picasa scans all your pictures and recognizes the same faces once you have identified them. Looking for a picture of yourself and your Aunt Gertrude, whom you’ve only seen a few times? It’s easy, all you would need to do is select the “People album” Picasa created for your aunt.

It doesn’t end there, and face tagging isn’t the focus on this article. There is another feature that is the photo importing tool. Previous versions of Picasa, and any other photo management tools I have used previously, wouldn’t let you select exactly which pictures you want to upload to your computer, and which you do not.

Trivial feature? Not at all,.. for example, on my recent trip I borrowed someone’s camera for a week. The camera still had pictures on it that didn’t belong to me, and I didn’t want to download them to my computer and then have to delete them again.

Another couple of reasons this feature rocks!

Aside from letting you choose which pictures to upload to your computer, it will also recognize the duplicate pictures already on your hard drive, but which you have not deleted from the camera yet. No matter which folder you put them into!
Sometimes you crop or change a picture, but leave the original on the memory card in your camera, Picasa will not automatically filter these out as duplicates, but you can easily do it manually.
You can also indicate which pictures shouldn’t hit your hard drive, but should instead go straight onto Picasa Web Albums.

How to upload your pictures, step by step

As we’re talking pictures here, the best step by step guide you can get to uploading your pictures is a visual one. Here is a detailed video showing you all the steps to importing your photos from your camera, excluding pictures, and uploading them to Picasa Web Albums.