Filling my Technological Void|Learning to Adapt to new Technology…… The Hard Way.

Although Linux has its fair share of alternatives for Picasa, this is one application I would prefer to not be without. Not to mention that its quite a hassle trying to download Pcitures from Web Albums if you dont have Picasa installed. As a matter of fact you actually have to download each picture one by one, or at least I couldn’t find any other way. I’ve listed the steps out one by one and the soruces I used so that if anyone wanted to use Picasa on their system this might help them out.

First lets start by getting the packages we need.This will vary based on whether you are using 64 bit Ubuntu or the 32 bit one. I’ve included the page which includes the packages for both.

Picasa for 32 bit Debian / Ubuntu

Picasa for 64 bit Debian / Ubuntu

In either case the download should start, but just in case if it doesn’t there is a link which lets you download it. The instructions on how to install it is also given on the page but of course just double clicking the deb file should install Picasa as well.You can find the application by going to Applications > Graphics > Picasa.

Although this does install Picasa it doesn’t actually let you download Web Albums using it. When I tried to download a Web Album using Firefox I found that nothing happened. It just sat there doing absolutely nothing. So I searched around a bit till I found out that you need to add a protocol handler which handled picasa:// . To fix this you first need to open up Firefox and enter the below code in the address bar.

about:config

Next right click in the screen below and you should get the popup as displayed below.

Now from the menu select New > String. next a screen will popup asking you for the preference name. In this box enter “network.protocol-handler.app.picasa” (without the quotes) and click ok. next for the above strings value you need to enter the path to wherre the executable for Picasa is found. On my system I found a link for it in the /usr/bin directory, your location may vary. The actuallocation of the file according to the link was in /opt/picasa/bin/picasa. Entering either of these paths into the value should be fine. I chose /opt/picasa/bin/picasa .

Next you want to repeat the above process except instead of creating a string you want to select New > Boolean  and enter the preference name as”network.protocol-handler.external.picasa” (again without the quotes) . For the value select true and you should be done.

To check it out go to anyone’s Web album and you should get a Download Web Album option. To illustrate the above I’ve shown the option from one of my friends Web Albums he had. Thanks to Ashwin for that (Although I’m seriously not a Hilary Duff Fan :D).

Next if you click on the link you should get a screen in Picasa which shows all the pictures on the Web Album. For the above example I get the screen as shown below.

That should help you to get working with Picasa in Ubuntu ot in any distro of Linux for that matter. Be sure to check out the below links as well as there are some bugs which are still being worked on.

Sources and References:

Picasa for Linux
Linux Brain Dump
And My Friend Ashwin for his Web Album