Fighting importing existing data from Google Picasa on Windows to Ubuntu

So I have a duel boot Windows XP and Ubuntu 9.10 machine. I have painstakingly identified faces on thousands of photos in Windows, so the prospect of losing all that in Ubuntu wasn't too pleasing.

I had installed Picasa 3.5 roughtly following this how-to. Great, that worked, but none of the meta data was there. Firstly have your windows partitions mounted. Mine are mounted to /media

• Add a link from the Google Wine sub directory to your windows data:

$ cd "~/.google/picasa/3.0/drive_c/Documents and Settings/<user name>/Local Settings/Application Data"
$ mv Google Google.real_dir
$ ln -s "/media/WindowsXP/Documents and Settings/Graham/Local Settings/Application Data/Google"

So far, so good. I tried this, though, and although my people gallery was populated, none of the photos they contained could be found. I guess this is because the links in the meta data pointed to non-existent folders. So, step 2

• Add a link to recreate the drives to match your windows ones. On mine, I had photos on E:\photos, mounted on Ubuntu as /media/data

$ cd ~/.google/picasa/3.0/dosdevices
$ ln -s /media/data 'e:'

This should then mean the existing Picasa meta data points to an existent path. Make sure that you re-import your photos using the new mapped drive though.

Posted via email from Graham's posterous