May 26, 2009

Picasa 3.1 imports pictures, then they disappear!

My wife loves her some Picasa! Let me tell you. She does everything in it. She does simple photo editing, stores her pics online, and shares them with friends and family. Recently she came upon an issue, and had to call me in for some help.

After our recent mishap with those douche bags at Acer and we got our computer back, we decided to go ahead and put Vista on it. Before sending it back to Acer we were running Windows XP. This is where the problem is.

Picasa You see, Picasa cannot view pictures that are contained in Hidden folders. The problem is that by default our user profiles were hidden. If you browsed into c:\users only the administrator and default profile were there! If you went into folder options, and select the option to view protected Windows system files it would show up.

Here is where another problem was. If you right click the user’s profile folder, the Hidden option was checked and grayed out! That usually means a setting in Group Policy, so I checked all Group Policy Objects and did not see an option for hiding users profiles.

So how are you suppose to remove the hidden folder attribute? I’ll tell you what I did, I dropped to command line (Start > Run > cmd > OK) and did the following:

  1. I changed into the C:\users directory

    c:\>cd \users

  2. I changed the file attributes

    c:\users>attrib -H -S "Wife" /D /S

Of course you will have to change “Wife” for your profile’s name, but after that my wife’s pictures saved in Picasa 3.1 without further issues.

Now I do realize that a lot of "regular" computer folk will be reading this looking for an answer, and may not know their way around the command line. For you guys, I wrote a quick script that you can download to your desktop, and all you have to do is double click on it and follow the prompts. You can download that script here: (Vista Picasa Fix - Right Click and select "Save Target As")

Please note that you have to be an administrator to run it!

I hope this helped you and your Picasa/Vista issues. If not, and you found a different method to fix it let me know what you did in the comments!



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