Update Picasa Painlessly

Google’s photo management system just made the leap from the kludgy and slow freebie alternative 2.6 to the thankfully much faster and altogether more professional version 2.7, so I hear. Unfortunately, hitting the Help menu and dropping down to “Checking for Updates Online” will likely leave your installation of version 2.6 stone cold. A little info dialog box will more than likely appear saying, “This application is up to date”. Well, there surely are, at least according to Amit Agarwal over on the Digital Inspiration blogspot who alerted me to the upgrade and to the new features we are missing out on such as Google Video support and reduced RAM overheads. As well as a RAW processing engine, with support for more cameras and improved color, a new color engine for “tuning” fixes, and some Google specific stuff such as support for Google Photos Screensaver and Improved BlogThis! reliability.

Anyway, the only solution, a kludge in itself, isto shut Picasa and visit the Picasa site itself so you can download it direct and install over the top of the old version. It’s a mere 4.6 Mb download so should not take more than a minute if you have a broadband connection. Do a quick virus scan (just in case), and then to the install.

It should all be slick and clean, except for perhaps a minor Firewall alert, which you can hopefully check and okay. You may see another dialog box telling you that a free update to Picasa is available, and asking if you want to download it. This seems wholly illogical, but say Yes, download now and another minute later you should see Picasa 2 downloading and autoinstalling again.

Unfortunately, when I restarted Picasa and looked in the About it told me I was at version 2.2. So I had to try again and that took me back to 2.6. Hopefully, you will have better luck with it than me. I seem to be stuck in a never-ending loop of “Do I want to update?”, “Update”, oh by the way, “Do you want to update”.

I suspect the solution will either be to totally format my hard disk and reinstall my OS, or maybe less radical would be to uninstall Picasa, reinstall the latest download, and then reindex my entire image collection (again)