Picasa Syncing with Dropbox via different PC/MAC

Question

Gd day everybody, following challenge: I have a ton of pictures on my computer (Mac 10.9.2) and I am using Picasa. All good working on a single computer, however I have another 3 Macs on which I would like to have all pictures synchronized. I already tried storing all my pictures on Dropbox and directing Picasa to those Dropbox folders....this has given me problems / conflicts as changes on one Mac do not properly show up on the other.

What i need is: - a sleek way to prevent these conflicts. - pictures are not simultaneously worked on on different macs, ...only me moving from one Mac to another. - it would be great if this can also be realized including a Windows 8 and another Windows 7 PC

would be great to hear if somebody has a solution for this.

current scenario:

• 4 different Mac in 4 different geographical locations
• All macs use picasa
• 40.000 pictures on dropbox in one main folder with many many subfoders

on each mac, picasa is directed to the dropbox folder, which contains the pictures.

Problem: I open picasa on my mac laptop and add pictures, modify existing pictures and delete some other pictures. Now I go to one of my other macs and open Picasa. The prolem is that changes made on the previous laptop are not showing up, instead within dropbox, a new folder is automatically created which contains “conflicts”.

It seems that the database file is located on each mac individually whereas the the actual pictures are located on dropbox.

So there seems to be a problem with the syncing of the database.

It happens that picasa is opened simultaneously on two or three different macs. changes will be made simultanously so it would be good to have some sort of pop up upon hitting the save button, advising the user that changes are currently being made on another computer.

Answer 1

welcome to superuser. I think this is just an issue with proper linking of the database files.

There are two possible solutions I can think of:

1. Put your database and picasa into dropbox. Putting picasa into dropbox can be optional. Either way, I imagine that you will have to change the setting inside picasa to explicitly tell picasa the location of the database. I think this website has all the steps you need. https://sites.google.com/site/picasastartersite/users-guide/dropbox-setup
2. Move the database to dropbox, and put a shortcut/alias in the original location pointing to the database. In OS X, look for folders like ~/Libraries/Application\ Support/Picasa