External Hard Drive and Picasa?

[lmilgram]

Hi - I'm considering getting an external hard drive for my laptop, but I currently rely on Picasa to organize all my photos/scrapping kits. From what I can tell Picasa only reads my laptop hard drive (c:/) and not files on disks/cds/dvds/jump drives...

Does anyone know if Picasa will read the files on the external drive?

Thanks!

[Teresa]

I am currently running photoshop staight from an external hard drive. Works fine! When I loaded the program, I simply picked the external hard drive as the place for it to be loaded to. Now the trick will be to ALWAYS plug the external hard drive into the same USB port on the computer because that is the path that the shortcut will follow to get to the files needed to start the program.

I can't see how your program would be any different. Give it a whirl.

[Lauren]

Picasa will read your external drive - I have all my data on my external - the one problem is though - if you tag your files and organise them in Picasa - and then one day turn picasa on when your external is not on - Picasa will "forget" all that tagging - thats quite a pain!!!!

[Kaer]

I have my stuff on an external drive too, no problem with Picasa. Just map your drive to a high letter like X or Z and tell Picasa to use that.
I don't recognize the problem that Lauren describes. All the keywords will not get lost, because the keywords are saved with the metadata of of the photos. Even other programs could use those keywords.
And stuff like albums and descriptions are in the Picasadatabase, but if the drive is not there, the picasadatabase still is. So when you later reconnect your drive (use the right drive-letter again) why would everything be lost?

[Lauren]

I dont know why it happens but its happened to me on several occasions - its fine if you turn your external off and dont turn picasa on in the mean time but if you happen to turn picasa on when your drive isnt there I know that for me the tagging and albums that I created disappeared . Mind you I didnt use keywords I added my images to an album to sort them - perhaps it would be safer to use keywords which are in fact attached to the actual photo

[lmilgram]

Thank you for all the input...I plan on going forward with the purchase.