From Picasa to Lightroom with the Picasa to Lightroom Importer plugin - Benoit De Boeck

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,…

If you have been using Picasa Desktop to manage your pictures collection and want to switch to Lightroom, my plugin Lightroom to Picasa Importer is now available.

This plugin imports the following from Picasa:

Albums (as collections under their original name)
Stars (in a collection named _Picasa Stars)
Faces (each recognized face gets its own album within a collection set named _Picasa Faces). Unknown faces are collected in an Unknown album.
Captions (searchable, can be found in the Metadata pane, in the Picasa Importer set)
Keywords (searchable, can be found in the Metadata pane, in the Picasa Importer set)
Cropped images (listed in a collection named _Picasa Cropped). It is unfortunately not possible to apply the crop with the current Lightroom API but at least all your cropped images will be collected in one collection. Much easier than to check which one has to be cropped in Picasa and Lightroom.
Images converted to black and white (listed in a collection named _Picasa B&W). It is unfortunately not possible to apply the conversion with the current Lightroom API. By selecting the images from this collection, you can then convert the whole collection to black and white in one click.

This plugin is free. But developing it took a lot of time and efforts. If you find it useful, please consider a donation (minimum 1 dollar or 1 euro, otherwise I will end up paying Paypal for your donation!).

Thanks!

You can download it here.

Short Usage Instructions

After installing and activating the plugin, you can check its options and select the data that you want to import (all of them are selected by default).

To import the Picasa data, first select in Lightroom the picture(s) for which you want the data to be imported. Then go to the File>Plug-In Extras>Import Picasa data for selected photos.
For the plugin to work, the folders containing the photos need to be online, so that it can read the Picasa data from these folders (i.e. it will not work if your photos are stored on a disconnected drive).
You can either import data for all photos (select your whole catalog) or only for subsets of photos (select the ones you need).

Once the Picasa data has been imported, a new collection set named Picasa Albums appears in the Collections pane.
Captions and keywords are visible (and searchable) in the Metadata pane, in the Picasa Importer set. If you use only jpg images, this is not needed as Picasa saved these data already in the jpg file and the captions and keywords will already be recognized by Lightroom. However, raw files were left untouched and importing the captions and keywords can then be useful.

The plugin has been tested on Windows and Mac, and works with Lightroom 5 and 6 or CC. Previous versions might also work but I have not tested them.
The plugin should automatically find the Picasa database folder. If, for one reason or another, the plugin cannot find it, you can manually adjust the folder location in the plugin options.