Advice needed for importing photos from Picasa

Fair enough, I'll ask on a Picasa forum then. I already had read the article you linked to, thanks though. Picasa's help doesn't go into details on how the Backup function works, but it seemed to me that it might preserve the folder hierarchies, which I would want so iPhoto's import would adopt the folder names as event names (at least I think that's how it works).

I just thought that since there are so many Windows converts on here they might have experience with the migration.

Hi, I did some research and figured it out, and thought I'd post my results here in case it can help someone else someday.

There are two ways to get photos out of Picasa: Exporting and Backing Up.

If you export photos, they all show up flattened-out in one folder. While this would technically work, the downside is iPhoto will suddenly have thousands of photos added to it and I'm not really sure how it will figure out the events (I didn't try importing into iPhoto yet).

If you use Picasa's Backup feature (Tools->Back up pictures) then all the photos show up with their folder hierarchies preserved. So for example you could end up with a folder containing the following folders and photos.

Vacation Photos
Vacation Photos/Hawaii 2009/
Vacation Photos/Hawaii 2009/pic1.jpg
Vacation Photos/Hawaii 2009/pic2.jpg
Vacation Photos/New York 2008/
Vacation Photos/New York 2008/pic1.jpg
Vacation Photos/New York 2008/pic2.jpg

etc.

From what I've read, if the "Vacation Photos" folder is imported into iPhoto, the folder names will be used as events, so in this example you'll end up with a "Hawaii 2009" event and a "New York 2008" event, which is nice.

As far as Picasa's Backup tool goes, it will create one or more top-level folders with names starting with a dollar sign. These represent the top-level folders containing photos. On the computer I tested this on I ended up with $Desktop, $My Documents, and $My Pictures, because all the photos on this computer were inside of the Desktop, My Documents, and My Pictures folders (and their children).

So in a nutshell, if you want to migrate from Picasa on Windows to iPhoto, just use Picasa's "Back Up Pictures" menu item if you want to preserve the folder hierarchy of your photos. Oh, one last thing: this feature doesn't let you back up to the same hard drive as the photos, so just share a folder on either your Mac or your PC and then back up to that folder.

Hope somebody finds this information useful.