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Prune Your Photo Collection with Picasa's Stars
Posted by Lifehacker US Edition at 9:00 PM on June 23, 2008
If you've accumulated a mess of digital photos and you know that many less than album-worthy ones are cluttering up your hard drive, Picasa can help prune your collection. Photography blogger Dave shares the following trick for quickly trimming down your collection to only the good stuff. Instead of focusing on the pictures which need to be deleted, focus on the ones you really like. Using the star function in Picasa, star each "keeper" in your collection. Once you've starred all the keepers select all of them via Edit - Select Starred and then select the inverse of the starred photos via Edit - Invert Selection. You now have selected all the photos that aren't album worthy and can delete them to make room for future photos. Here's more on organising your digital photos with Picasa.
Windows/Mac/Linux (All Systems): One fine day in the future, Google will release a Picasa client for Mac OS X, making it possible for anyone to upload or download a Picasa Web Album from any system. Until then, tools like Bradley Beach's PicasaWebalbumsAssistant will help a great deal. Beach's Java-based tool lets ou grab either public albums by entering a username, or private albums from an emailed invitation link. Better still, it offers thumbnail previews of the album you're about to download, and you can skip shots you don't need. Combined with the previously-posted, OS X-only 
The Digital Inspiration blog points us to Google's opening up of the API for buttons in Picasa, and includes a link that installs a button to send pictures directly from Picasa to Adobe Photoshop for editing. Expect to see a lot more of these buttons, now that both desktop and web applications can create their own links. To install the Photoshop button, head to the Digital Inspiration link below and click the "Install Photoshop CS3 Button," which should launch Picasa (if it's not already running) and ask you to place the button yourself. Those with a head for hacking can check out 
Blogger Vinayaka CA details how he uses Google's excellent photo management application Picasa to manage multiple photo libraries. His solution: Create a Picasa library under another user account (e.g., PicasaUser) on your Windows PC, then put a shortcut to Picasa on your main desktop. Whenever you want to use your alternate Picasa library, right-click the shortcut and select Run as ->PicasaUser. You'll have to provide the other username and password every time you do it, and this isn't as clean as if Picasa actually supported multiple libraries (like iPhoto and iTunes do), but it's a good workaround if you want to separate your pics into multiple libraries. I gave it a try and it seemed to work, but if you've got a better method, let's hear it in the comments.
