Picasa 3 OS X and a shared image database

At home I use Macs and for viewing photos I use Picasa. It is the best tool I have found for the task as; it is happy to let you choose where to put the images and if I make corrections it doesn't change the originals.

Central library

One annoyance though is that each computer has it's own library locally, so when I add new pictures both libraries have to scan the watched folders.  So I spent an hour hacking around to see if I can move the local database to a share on my home server.

Symlinks

Picasa 3 keeps the image database in:

~/Library/Application Support/Google/Picasa/db3/

view raw example1.sh hosted with ❤ by GitHub

I found the path after looking in the Preferences -> Network page.  Now I moved in to a terminal window to;

• Create a PicasaDb on my home server
• Copy the local database to the folder on the share
• Rename my original database
• Create a symlink to the database now living on the server share

	mkdir /Volumes/192.168.0.1/PicasaDb
	cp db3/** /Volumes/192.168.0.1/PicasaDb
	mv db3 db3old
	ln -s /Volumes/192.168.0.1/PicasaDb db3

view raw example2.sh hosted with ❤ by GitHub

With all this in place I fired up Picasa and it still worked, first hurdle over.  I then edited an image and still no problems. I check the timestamps on the database files on the server and they had been updated plus, Picasa had not created a new database locally.

Next time I will attempt the same on the other computer to find out if Picasa will happily share a database.