After upgrading and starting, Picasa 3 rescanned all pictures and then
(once the scan was complete) deleted all album definitions. Thank you
very much. I've had this happen with Picasa 2 once in a while (had
hoped that this would have been fixed in Picasa 3). This time at least
Picasa created backup copies of the album definition files under
"Picasa2Albums/backup/Sep 2, 2008/". But how do I restore the albums?
Copying the album definition files back into "Picasa2Albums/hhhh.../"
doesn't do much good as they are deleted right away when Picasa starts.

I have exactly the same problem :-(
_Very_ annoying...
Please help!!

On 2 Sep., 23:17, Eric Jain wrote:

Looks like the problem was due to invalid paths in the album
definition files (.pal). Fixing the paths (and having Picasa rebuild
its internal database) solved the problem.

Paths can not be invalid in my .pal files, since Picasa2 recognizes
them with no problems at all.
How did you rebuild the database? By deleting the "db" folder in the
Documents and Settings....?
I tried this, but Picasa just deletes my .pal files right after
starting.
What exactly was wrong with your paths?

On Sep 3, 10:32 pm, Eric Jain wrote:

The paths looked something like "$My Pictures/images/foo", which was
wrong (I don't have a "My Pictures" folder in my setup, and the "$My
Pictures" system folder resolves to "images")... Picasa 2 nevertheless
managed to find the images as (I suppose) it removed the "$My
Pictures" which it couldn't resolve, and prefixed "$My Documents" to
the path. Picasa 3 on the other hand seems to be stricter.

To rebuild the database (as per instructions from a Googler) hit Ctrl-
Alt-Shift right after launching Picasa (i.e. within a fraction of a
second of clicking on the Picasa icon, may require some practice). If
you get this right, you will be prompted if you want to have all data
reset. Before you proceed with this, copy your .pal files back into
the directory from which they were deleted.