Folder properties in Picasa 2.5

Folders have a large part to play in organizing photos within Picasa, and it is therefore useful to take a close look at what Picasa allows us to do to a folder.

The current folder may be selected by clicking on one of the folders shown in the folder tree at the left of the screen, and this causes the folder and its images to scroll into view on the main pane to the right of the screen.

The display shows

• A folder icon - which if you move the mouse over, the icon shows a more open folder, and a tooltip showing the location of the folder on disk (and clicking this will open that folder in Explorer).
• Alongside the icon is the name of the folder (which Picasa tries to keep in sync with the name used to store the folder on the disk) - double clicking this brings up the folder properties dialog.
• Below the name is the date for the folder, followed by optional "place taken" text - double clicking these also bring up the folder properties dialog.
• Below the date and location is a row of buttons, which depend on which options apply to this folder, and may be hidden or grayed out if they do not currently apply.
• Below the buttons is an optional description for the folder, or the grayed out text "Add a description" if no description has been given. This description can be changed in view, simply my clicking on it, and making the changes in place.
• Finally below all of that, we get to see the thumbnails of items in the folder.

Buttons that may occur in the row of buttons include

• "Select Starred" - which is always present, but grayed out if there are no starred items in the folder
• "Save Changes (x)" which only appears when there are items whose appearance in Picasa differs from their appearance in their on disk form

The folder properties dialog allows you to change all of the name, date, location, and description.  It is brought up either from the "Folder > Edit Description..." main menu item; the "Edit Description..." entry on the context menu which appears when you right click on the folder name; or by double clicking the existing folder name.

 

The various text entry boxes do not limit how much much text you enter.

The description box allow for multiple paragraphs of text.  You can separate each paragraph by typing Ctrl-Enter between paragraphs, or you can prepare your description text somewhere else, and then paste it into this box.  These text boxes allow the full range of characters to be included, but there is no control over formatting beyond the use of separate paragraphs.

The date may be changed by overtyping, or by clicking on the drop-down arrow, which brings up a calendar chooser.

The name, date, location and description fields are all redundantly stored in the picasa.ini file inside the folder, so have an existence outside of the Picasa database.

Bugs in folder properties and display

Trying all the options in folder properties in sufficient detail to write the description above uncovered a few bugs:

1. The display of the date does not follow the configured regional settings - it appears to use a fixed American form of date "Sep 27, 2006" rather than using either the short date or the long date formats from the Windows Regional options configuration.
2. Entering a long piece of text for the place taken field (for example pasting in a paragraph of text about the place) causes the text to display on top of the buttons below it, and if sufficient text is entered, to also draw on top of the description text, and the thumbnails themselves.
3. Entering a long description, perhaps several paragraphs of text about the pictures in the folder, also causes display problems - when the text is long enough that it takes up all the available height of the screen, then on scrolling the thumbnails into view, the thumbnails often get caught up in a continual repainting cycle.
4. Spotting that you probably should not have entered as much text as you did, and going back to the properties and deleting it, may not fix the problem - the folder view does not resize if you remove text from the description, and so may still show as a big blank area until you scroll right away from the current folder and then return to it.
5. When editing the name of the folder, Picasa tries to keep the folder name on disk in step with the name it is using within Picasa, but this fails far more often than it should with a popup.  For example, you can get this if you simply try to change the first letter of the folder name to a capital letter, which should be perfectly easy to accomplish.  At other times, this changing the case of the letter succeeds, but the folder name (both within Picasa and on disk) gains an ugly and unwanted "_1" addition at the end of the folder name.
6. When editing the folder description in place, with certain multiline descriptions, as the cursor flashes, the thumbnails continually scroll up and down by a small amount.