Change drive letters

[picasaonnas]

Hi,
How should I change the drive letters of the database?

I store my pictures on a nas, it is over 200GB so I have also a huge
database with faces as well.
The nas has an unlucky service what is indexing and generating
thumbnails all the way... but it is an other story - seems to be
solved.
The only way I found that I do not use its system shared folder called
"Photo" anymore.
In the past I assigned the letter "P" with this "Photo" network
folder.
I just changed my mind now and would like to use my database with a
new assigned drive letter "F" with a new folder on the nas named
"Foto".
All of my pictures are there now.
Ok, I see that there is a way to use it as like the "Foto" named
network folder would be assigned with drive letter "P"... but I prefer
"F" and "Foto". :/
Well, where or in which files should I change it? What would be the
easiest way to get my database back?
Thank you!

[earlboss]

Hi picasaonnas:
Maybe someone with more experience than I can better answer this, but
when you look at the database files, the drive letter is everywhere! I
don't think it is practical to try to move the pictures without
regenerating the database. PicasaStarter gives you tools to copy the
google apps data to another location which moves the contacts and (I
think) the albums along with the database and other data, which at
least gets you the names and face boxes etc. The problem is that
Picasa then has to regenerate the database, and this ends up losing
all the ignored faces and they come back as unnamed or suggested
names.

The only way I have ever been able to move pictures to another drive
without regenerating the database is by moving them with Picasa, and
that is not very practical with the size of your pictures set. I am
not sure there are no problems, because I only tried it on a sample
set of pictures. Also I don't know what happens to other files such as
thumbnails or files generated by other programs in the directories
that are moved. They might be moved or they might be left in the
original location. You might want to set up a sample and play on that
first.

PLEASE DON'T TRY THIS WITHOUT MAKING A BACKUP OF EVERYTHING ASSOCIATED
WITH PICASA AND YOUR PICTURES!

The technique using Picasa either native or with PicasaStarter is as
follows:
- You need to have the pictures and databases etc up to date in the
original location.
- There must be a drive in the final location with enough space to
hold all the pictures and the database.
- Make a backup copy of your present Google data directory so you will
have it if something goes wrong.
- Start Picasa using Picasastarter if necessary to view your pictures.
- If you are in flat folder view, make sure there is at least one
picture in the root pictures directory so the root folder will show up
in the folders list.
- In the folders list, find the root folder and click on it to be sure
it is the right one.
- Right-click on the root folder name in the folders list.
- Select the location to move the pictures to (probably the F: drive
in your case).

Picasa will now be busy for a long while because it has to copy
(actually move) all the pictures to the destination drive, and it has
to change all the drive letters in the database, but it doesn't
rebuild the database or change the names. After this is done, you have
a database still in the old location, that has the new location drive
references.

- Now exit Picasa, and it will probably compact it's database. After
that you could go back into Picasa if you want to be sure everything
is still ok.
- Go into PicasaStarter and copy the present data directory to the new
Drive data location and make a reference to it or modify the old
reference to point at the new database.
- You should now be able to run PicasaStarter and Picasa on the new
location.
- You should go into Tools-Folder Manager and make sure only your new
pictures folder is being watched, not the original My Pictures folder.
- Since you may have had to use a different folder for the move
pictures target, you may want to copy the pictures and data folders
back to the original place and map it to the F: drive or whatever.

See, I told you it was a royal PIA, but probably still better than
regenerating the whole database and re-ignoring all the unnamed faces.

If something goes wrong the best suggestion I have is to copy all the
pictures back to the old location, and delete the old location google
directory and rename the copy you made at the beginning back to the
original name. After this is done PicasaStarter should again be able
to see everything in the original directory location.

Earl

[earlboss]

Hi picasaonnas:

I tried this out to refresh my memory and it seems to work. There are
a few points I want to expand on:

- Look at the PicasaStarter FAQ for information on how to copy the
Database to the new drive. Make a directory for the database so it
won't be at the root of the drive.
- When you go to the tools-folder manager, the moved pictures
directorys will be marked as scan once, you should mark the root
directory as Scan Always, unless for some reason you really don't want
to find new pictures as you load them.
- You should usually mark My Pictures as Remove, since it will be
different on each computer or user and that can cause some pain if it
updates everytime.

Earl

> > Thank you!- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

[tnewbold]

Hi earlboss,

I realize this is a very old thread, but I have a similar problem. 

Current situation:

- Massive photo database with lots of album and face data. 

- I have a newly installed SSD drive with a fresh Windows 7 installation (you can see where this is going...). 

- My photos were on drive C which was a raid disk with the OS on it too (oops, won't do that again). 

- Now the new SSD system disk is assigned letter C. 

- There is not enough space on new C drive to move the pics there, otherwise that would have been the easiest solution (then move them back to the Raid disk from within Picasa). 

- Have backed up the old Picasa DB files to secure location

- Photos on RAID disk and are backed up on NAS

What I want to do:

- Preserve the existing Picasa DB data as reliably as possible.

The two options I see:

- Boot the system from the old C drive and move the pictures from within Picasa to the NAS (probably would take days), then back on the new C, boot up, install Picasa and copy over the Picasa DB files, then move the photos from within Picasa itself back to the Raid disk.

- Find a way to bulk edit the Picasa DB files to chance the drive letter references within the DB files (like a "Search and Replace All" function).  That would be preferable if it were possible. Can anyone let me know if this would be possible, and, if so, the best way to do it?

Many thanks in advance!  

[earlboss]

Hi:

Editing the database to change paths is VERY hard, because the database files are (almost) all binary files so the changed path has to be exactly the same length and the index has to point correctly at it. You also have to do all the work on all the files exactly correctly or pointers will not be right. You can try if you want, but if you are successful you will be the first as far as I know.

As of Picasa 3.9, all the data you need to rebuild the database is in the .picasa.ini files and the photo metadata, so you can do a very good job of rebuilding the database and losing no information.

Here is a Picasa FAQ we wrote on rebuilding the database:

https://sites.google.com/site/picasaresources/Home/Picasa-FAQ/picasa/troubleshooting/how-to-rebuild-database 

In that FAQ we discuss how to rebuild the database for various purposes and the limitations.

For your task, I would just copy all my Photo folders to a pictures location  ( I usually assign a drive or Folder (NAS or other) to the P: drive, then make a folder on P: called Pictures or some such, then copy all the folders that were in My Pictures to this Pictures folder. (Copy complete folders and folder trees so the .picasa.ini hidden files remain in their folders.).

Then I would make a new database (probably in P:\P_Database\) and start picasa with this database.

When Picasa starts, I would go to tools->Folder MAnager and set it to Scan Always on the P:\Pictures folder.

Picasa will start indexing the P:Pictures folder and I would exit Picasa before that is done.

Then I would go to my old database and copy the Google\Picasa2\Contacts\contacts.xml file into that same location in my new database. This file contains references to all the people names.

After the contacts file is in the database, I would start Picasa again and let it run for a bunch of hours until it has indexed all the folders and then done face recognition on all the faces.

At that point you should have a pretty good database ahd have back all your edits etc.

One thing to mention again is you will have all the faces you have ignored in the past back in the unknown people album and will have to ignore them again.

It is getting late here so make sure you read what I said above and ask questions if something doesn't make sense.

Earl

[tnewbold]

Hi again, Earl,

Thank you a million. I am in the process of the initial scan and am glad to hear that the DB rebuilding process is built into the INI files. I will copy over the contacts file, though interestingly, the "People" section was already complete with all the people I had identified in my previous install of Picasa. 

Thanks again for your prompt and very complete answer to my question. Gold star from me ;-)  Cheers!

[earlboss]

Hi:

If all the people are there it is not important to copy over the contacts.xml, and might even cause some problems or duplicates. One thing to do might be to not erase the existing contacts.xml, but instead rename the existing contacts.xml to backup.xml and then copy it to the contacts folder. When Picasa sees a backup.xml, it merges it with it's existing contacts.xml file.  This will avoid the possibility that something might be changed between the backup and the new database.

If you got all your people named, you probably were set up to store nametags in the photos. That puts the face names into the metadata in the photo and makes nametags more resistant to being lost.  Do watch out for the possibility that Picasa might try to double-tag some of the faces that you manually added, because when you manually tag a face, the box you drew night not be placed the same as Picasa would do it.

Earl

[earlboss]

Hi:

Just a couple of clarifications.

for the contacts.xml file, I meant that you should keep the contacts.xml that was generated during the rebuild, but you could make a copy of the contacts.xml file from the backup, and rename that to backup.xml, then copy it to the contacts folder in the new database.  Before doing that though I would make sure I saved a copy of the new contacts.xml file.

Earl