In Picasa - what’s the difference between Folders and Albums?

Q: In Picasa - what’s the difference between Folders and Albums?

A: Folders actually contain photos and they use space on your hard drive “C”; but “Albums”, only exist within Picasa.

Lets say you name your folders by date & event, like I do. You might have a main folder for a specific year, then within that year you might have sub-folders by months or events - then within a specific event folder you might have additional sub-sub-folder... For example, you went to California for 2 weeks, so inside a California Trip folder, which is inside your 2011 Folder, you have 3 sub-folders for: 320 pictures in a San Diego sub-folder; 120 in a Hollywood sub-folder and another 280 in a San Francisco sub-folder. Your family and friends might love you, but showing that many pictures to anyone would probably not be a great idea, so we want to “choose some from each city sub-folder, to create a “synopsis” folder or album, to create a slideshow, a book, or other project..

That’s where your Picasa Albums can come in very handy - but it's important you understand albums versus folders....

Folders actually contain photos.

• The folders you see in Picasa are the real folders you see when you are looking in your Picture drawer on Windows Explorer (what I call my vault).



• If you delete a photo from a folder in Picasa, the real photo in the real folder on your hard drive, will also be deleted.



• And, when you delete a photo from a folder in your Picture drawer on Windows Explorer (what I call my vault) it will no longer be in the Picasa view.

Albums, on the other hand, only exist within Picasa.

• Albums "point to" photos in folders, they don’t actually have their own copies of photos.



• Albums let us create multiple ways to view and organize the photos in your folders.



• If you add a photo to an album, the photo remains in its original folder and Picasa adds a reference to that photo to the album.



• If you delete a photo from an album, the photo remains in its original folder and Picasa removes that album's reference to that photo.



• A photo exists in exactly one folder, but the photo can appear in (be referenced by) several albums.



• If you delete a photo from a folder, the photo will be removed from the folder AND any albums it appears in (because the albums no longer have a photo to reference).

Some of us organize our photos using Windows Explorer by creating a main Project folders in the Picture "vault" for our “copies”, but another way to do that is to create Albums in Picasa, to organize your photos.

Main difference is, if I put copies in a folder in the Main Picture drawer using Windows Explorer they are truly copies; whereas albums are not true copies…

So when you use albums in Picasa, you are not using actual space on your hard drive