Recent Projects: Picasa and ancient breadmakers

[snarp]

How To Make Picasa Index All Of Your Frigging Images, Rather Than Merely The Ones Of Which It Approves

Picasa by default does not index PNGs, GIFs, or TGAs. It indexes, but does not display, pictures of under 250×250 pixels in size. The problem with this is not that this is the default setting - this set-up makes sense for people using the software mainly for photo management, who probably make up most of its user base, and who don’t want Picasa indexing all the GIFs in every piece of software on their machine’s UIs.

The problem is that failures that this causes happen silently. In Windows, when one right-clicks a PNG, GIF, or TGA and selects “Open in Picasa,” Picasa opens, but the image doesn’t. There’s no pop-up to explain this. When one attempts to add such a file to the Picasa index through the “File >> Add file to Picasa…” menu option, it scrolls down to the appropriate folder and behaves as if the file was added. There is no pop-up explaining that it wasn’t.

One can open an undersize image in Picasa by clicking on it in Windows Explorer, but it won’t show up in the directory view. It also won’t upload with the rest of the folder if one attempts to publish to Google Photos.

So, if one (today, one is me) finds that not all the files in a folder are showing up, one doesn’t know why, and assumes the problem to be a bug in Picasa’s indexing. (I would bet that some of the people in this thread are actually having this problem.)

So, to make Picasa recognize PNGs, GIFs, and TGAs:

1) Open Picasa. Go to “Tools >> Options…”

2) Click on the “File Types” tab.

3) Check the boxes for the filetypes you want it to index and click “OK”.

To make it recognize small images, go to “View” and click the menu item “Small Pictures”.

Something else to keep in mind, if you find Picasa still isn’t showing all of your images after doing this, is that it is by default set to detect duplicate photos and only load one - which seems to apply to thumbnails and their larger versions. I found that with duplicate detection turned on, Picasa (version 3.1.0) would about half the time index my thumbnails and then skip over the original version. (The other half it would index the original and skip the thumbnails, which I think is a more desirable behavior.) This, I would label definitively as a bug - it’s just not something you want your image management software doing in any circumstance. The only solution I could find for this was to switch duplicate detection off entirely. To do this,

1) Open Picasa. Go to “Tools >> Options…”

2) Click on the “General” tab.

3) Uncheck the box for “Automatically detect duplicate files while importing.”

Finally, if you were for any reason to want Picasa to show transparent placeholder images of the type used in web design, you’re probably out of luck - I haven’t been able to find any way to accomplish this.

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How To Make Your Elderly Breadmaker Blend The Dough Properly So There Aren’t Big Clumps Of Dry Flour Left In There

1) Remember to actually screw the kneading paddle in there. (Not that I have ever made this mistake more than twice.)

2) Put all the ingredients except the yeast into the basin, and mix them up with a spoon just enough that all the flour is at least damp. Then add the yeast and start the machine.

(This is a Welbilt Baker’s Select ABM6200. If the internet is to believed, it doesn’t even exist.)

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)