How to migrate from iPhoto to Picasa?

I'd like to migrate from iPhoto '09 to Picasa. Any ideas how?

I was planning to run Picasa, let it import iPhoto's pictures and then move the pictures and databases to Picasa on Windows, but Picasa did a mess of the pictures. It picked images of all over my home directory and events that are really one event but were imported in three phases ended up as Event1, Event2, Event3.

Any ideas how to migrate? Of course I'd like to retain places, events, keywords and if possible, faces.

pupeno

Posted 2009-07-16T19:18:36.883

Reputation: 8 223

+1 for above two comments. Also, that question is about iPhone, this has nothing to do with iPhone. – Jonik – 2009-09-08T09:33:23.823

This looks dangerously close to http://superuser.com/questions/3527/need-an-application-for-uploading-pictures-from-an-iphone-to-picasa-or-flickr

– TheTXI – 2009-07-16T19:23:22.410

2It's nothing like that question. – Mark – 2009-07-16T22:49:08.267

3TheTXI, that question is about Picasa Web, not Picasa, the desktop application. – pupeno – 2009-07-16T22:52:55.090

Answers

Sometimes the answer is "no". As in this case, you cannot migrate and keep faces and places. You would be lucky not to lose your events, but Picasa and iPhoto use a different system for that.

Bottom line (even though it's not good news): be prepared to make lots of manual corrections and re-enter data if you want to migrate. Don't ditch iPhoto until you are happy with Picasa, or youll end up with 2 half solutions.

Best of luck though, let us know what happens!

dyve

Posted 2009-07-16T19:18:36.883

Reputation: 1 208

I was able to retain the events only by exporting event by event from iPhoto so that they end with the event name in the file name, and then sorting them back on iPhoto. All other data was lost. I'm back at iPhoto. – pupeno – 2009-12-05T17:03:44.053

I think I'm going with iphotoexport:

iphotoexport allows you to export and synchronize your iPhoto library to a folder tree. It preserves both the original and modified image, your event and album organization, and applies your iPhoto titles, descriptions, keywords, and face tags to the IPTC/EXIF metadata of your images. You can export a full copy of your library, or just build a tree of linked images that require very little additional disk space. You can re-run iphotoexport at any time to synchronize any changes made in iPhoto to your export tree quickly. iphotoexport works well with file-system based photo management tools like Picasa or Adobe Bridge.

iphotoexport is written in Python, and can easily be customized.

pupeno

Posted 2009-07-16T19:18:36.883

Reputation: 8 223

iPhotoExport was replaced by PhotoShare which is also open source and appears to have all the features.

– Jim McKeeth – 2011-04-08T16:06:51.723

According to this article on Google Support, you can choose "Import from iPhoto" from the file menu in Picasa. As dyve suggested, I highly doubt it will preserve Faces and Places, but I think it might preserve events (although don't take my word for it).

Josh Hunt

Posted 2009-07-16T19:18:36.883

Reputation: 20 095

That just copies the files not respecting events, albums or anything. – pupeno – 2009-09-08T08:05:53.343