How can I move Picasa3 from one OSX machine to another without burning disks?

Question

I have all my pictures, captions, etc in Picasa3 on one OSX machine. I want to move everything to another OSX machine. How can I do that?

I'm aware of the "backup" feature (Tools -> Back Up Pictures), but it seems to only support burning disks, which seems wasteful in my case; these two machines are on the same network and I'm comfortable using rsync on the command line.

Answer 1

1. Ensure you know where your pictures are located on your old computer. In picasa3, File -> Add Folder To Picasa shows you places it looks for pictures. In my case, I've set it to only use ~/Pictures.
2. Copy pictures from the old computer to the new, using something like caffeinate -i rsync -avz --progress me:oldcomp.local:Pictures ~/oldcomp_pictures
3. Copy the Picasa3 database from the old computer to the new, using something like caffeinate i- rsync -avz --progress "me:oldcomp.local:Library/Application\ Support/Google/Picasa3/db3" ~/oldcomp_db3
4. Rename ~/Pictures to ~/old_Pictures and similarly set aside the existing db3 folder on the new computer
5. Rename the copied pictures and db folders to replace them
6. Open Picasa - everything should be there.

Note that copying the pictures may take a LONG time. If your WiFi is not the fanciest and newest kind, plugging both computers into the same router with Ethernet cable may speed things up dramatically. Using caffeinate will keep them from falling asleep during the process, assuming they don't drain their batteries; it's probably best to plug them in during the process.