After suffering several Picasa crashes under Wine recently, I decided to upgrade to Google’s Picasa for Linux package with an integrated and tweaked version of Wine. The RPM install was quite easy, leaving me to move my Picasa data to the new copy.
While Picasa is very good about storing information in the image file instead of a separate database, it does store thumbnails and some metadata in a Google/Picasa2Albums folder. This Google folder should be moved to "~/.picasa/drive_c/Documents and Settings/matthew/Local Settings/Application Data". The ~/.picasa directory is the same as a ~/.wine directory, so you can also add any additional drive mappings under dosdevices.
Picasa will now find your old library, and show all your previous photos without needing to regenerate thumbnails. Hopefully, it’ll also be a little more robust!
