As I start writing this it has been 3 days – exactly 72 hours since I started uploading my digital photo collection to Picasa web. The process is still ongoing. I have spent most of the time away from the computer as it uploads but have checked back a couple times a day to see how the upload is progressing.
First a bit of a background on the environment. Our photos have bounced among several computers over the past 13 years. 13 years, that is about how long we have been taking digital photos and have gone through a couple of generations of technology. The majority of our photos are sitting on an aging server in our basement. The C Drive, the drive the operating system is on is out of space. All of our files, at least the ones we can move are on the D drive, there is still about 100 gigabytes of space on the D drive.
Why so much information on the space issue? Well Picasa likes to use space under the users profile to store logs, a database of faces, and temporary files under the users profile directory. By default this folder is on the same drive as the operating system – the C drive. This presents a bit of a problem when the drive is low, to the point it is out of space. I free up a gig or three to make room, but it is filled up over a couple of hours. I’ve turned of logging, but still the space disappears. After of 24 hours of trying to move the pictures from the drive to Picasa web I’ve given up on doing it from this machine.
I have moved on to my laptop and mapped to the D drive where the files are stored. Picasa has scanned the directory and found all of the albums and images and now I realize my next problem. Although I am using Picasa Web and trying to use the online contact features to track people, Picasa on the first machine does not know anything of Picasa on the next machine. I really did not expect them to, although it would be nice, especially since I am using the web account. The bigger problem is not really the face matching though, it’s that the images that were successfully uploaded from the first machine are going to be uploaded again from the second machine. I am going to have duplicate pictures on Picasa Web. It would be great if Picasa web could detect and eliminate duplicate images in my albums. Since I have paid for 80 gigabytes of storage I will just shrug this off for now and try and deal with it later.
It took almost 5 days to get all the pictures uploaded and I have a bunch of duplicates. We’ll go through those over time. Now it’s on to making sure we make it a regular hair of putting the pictures on Picasa as soon as we connect the camera to the computer.