Picasa Photos Missing

Picasa seems to be a poorly written piece of software; it's a shame that it's one of the few that nonetheless has exactly the type of photo tagging UI that I need.

The point of Picasa is that it keeps a database of all the photos on your computer, and you can create copies or tags using the database. Too bad the database fails a lot.

Basically, if you install Picasa and tell it to (or let it) find all the photos on your hard drive, the ingest process will choke, huge numbers of photos won't be ingested into the database, and there is no way to fix the database other than uninstall Picasa and reinstall it.

I did a gigantic search where I found people posting over and over again that this bitter conclusion is the only option. It was a while ago so I lost most of my open tabs. Here are a couple of links but not necessarily the best ones.

http://picasatutorials.com/2010/04/albums-vs-tags/

http://64.233.163.104/support/forum/p/Picasa/thread?tid=1e8d137ce6dd8b04&hl=en

In order to prevent the ingest tool from fucking itself up, you have to completely uninstall Picasa, reinstall it, and don't let it try to find all the photos on your hard drive. Then once the install process is complete, use to select very small sections of your photo folders and ingest them, letting it finish each time. Doing this will produce a complete ingest and things go a little better from there.