Importing the Picasa database to Lightroom

This post had been waiting in my drafts folder for a long time! Here it is published at last!

After the recent announcement by Google that they would stop active development of Picasa Desktop, a lot of people are looking for an alternative to replace it without losing all their albums, keywords,…

Good news for those who have been using Picasa Desktop to manage their pictures collection and want to switch to Lightroom: my plugin Lightroom to Picasa Importer is now available.
You might have seen my previous post about my procedure to convert Picasa Desktop albums into Lightroom collections. Although this was working, I found that it was a really cumbersome procedure and I wanted to find an easier way to do it. So, after a lot of information gathering and research on the structure of the Picasa database, I had enough information to try and build a Lightroom plugin to do the work automatically. I decided to take the plunge and quickly learned how to code in Lua to be able to write a plugin for Lightroom.

The result: a Lightroom plugin that allows you to:

  • convert your Picasa (Desktop) albums into Lightroom collections;
  • import your Picasa tags (keywords) and captions into Lightroom
  • import the faces recognized by Picasa, the images corresponding to each of them in their own Lightroom collection;
  • collect all images that have been converted to black & white in Picasa and gather them in a Lightroom collection (the plugin can unfortunately not convert the image to B&W with the current Lightroom API);
  • collect all images that have been cropped in Picasa and gather them in a Lightroom collection (the plugin can unfortunately not apply the crop with the current Lightroom API);
  • convert your Picasa stars into a Lightroom collection;

For more details, a short user guide, and the download link, please visit the plugin page.

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