Picasa: Creating a simple slide show CD or DVD with JPG images

As a photographer, I like easy ways of storing, editing and producing digital pictures. As a moderate user of Adobe Photoshop, I have now discovered Picasa, Free Software from Google that allows you to simply catalogue, store and perform some post production enhancements to your digital pictures.

Like many Digital Photographers, you may want duplicates (multiple versions) of your digital pictures, to which you apply various enhancements - cropping, B&W, softening, etc. If you are using Picasa, then you will need to apply some file renaming to ensure your pictures are grouped together: picture original, picture copy1, picture copy2,,,picture copyn. Currently, duplicating a digital picture within Picasa does not produce a filename which preserves the desired filename sequence (ascending sort - alphabetic order) - "Original, OriginalCopy, OriginalCopy (2),,OriginalCopy (n)"

Do not despair. Here is a simple fix that will ensure that your 'CD of JPG images' will playback properly on an inexpensive DVD player ($29.95 at Walmart), which is capable of playing back (like a Slide Show) stored JPG images.

A little background on how Picasa creates JPG file copies on your computer. When you copy/duplicate a file in Picasa it creates the copied file with the following prefix - “Copy of IMAGEnnnn.jpg”. Since alphabetic sequencing has "C" coming before "I", this means that all of the prefixed files with “Copy of” are saved in your computer [picture] directory ahead of the original JPG images, which all start with “IMG” or “IMAGE” - Ouch! But you want all your JPG picture files to start with "IMG" or "IMAGE", just like they were originally created on your digital camera.

Apply a simple and consistent renaming of these "Copy of" JPG files and you will get the desired playback sequence. Rename these “Copy of” files so that the original filename prefix is preserved - “IMG” or“IMAGE”. Just remove the “Copy of” prefix and add an appropriate ascending numeric sequence suffix to each of the copied files.
For example, IF your original JPG file and the Picasa two copies were:
IMG_2787, Copy of IMG_2787, Copy (2) of IMG_2787
THEN you would rename the TWO Copy files to get this grouped sequence:
IMG_2787, IMG_2787-2, IMG_2787-3

Now you will be sure that the filename sequence will match your desired Slide Show sequence.

You can submit an enhancement request to Picasa to fix the way they name copied files (Adobe has is right!). You can submit your request to: Picasa Help Ticket Submission. The more requests the sooner they fix this inconvenience.

For other timely tips, go to:

Foursight Photography
And
BizFare Enterprise