Burning Pictures to Disc

A friend of mine, had her house severely damaged in the recent floods in Tennessee.  The house has now been cleaned and gutted and they will spend many months putting it back together.  To help the construction workers in putting shelves etc. back in her desired places, she decided to go thru all her pictures from the last few years and collect appropriate photos of each room.  She then wanted to put all those pictures onto CD to take to a printer to create a large format print to be tacked to the wall in each room.

Pictures in an Album

All the pictures were organized into a Picasa album, but how does she burn them to CD?  She couldn’t find any command to ‘Burn to CD’ or ‘Copy to Disk.’  When she tried to Export and specified the DVD drive, she got an error message, “The Destination Directory could not be Created.”

She was afraid that she had to use Windows and find all the pictures all over again, copying them to CD as she went.  She could have exported the album to another folder, then used Windows to burn that folder to CD.  But Picasa can do the entire job, if you know where to look.

Two Choices

Picasa actually makes it very easy to copy pictures to disk, but you won’t find it listed in quite the way you might expect, so a lot of people miss it.  There are two ways to copy files to disk and both are available on the main menu.

1. Backup (Tools menu, Backup Pictures)
   Just click on the desired album and then Tools, Backup Pictures.  Click ‘New Set’ and give it a name.  This will copy the original pictures *and* all Picasa edits
   


2. Gift CD (Create menu, Create a Gift CD)
   Same start – select the desired album, then choose Create, Create a Gif CD, and Picasa will burn your edited pictures to the CD or DVD in your drive.

Picasa will complete the entire job for you, burning the CD or DVD.  The only difference is that, with Backup, you’ll have your original pictures plus any edits.  To see the photos as edited, you would need to restore and work with the photos using Picasa.   Using the Gift CD method, the .jpg files on the disk will be the edited versions – just as if you Exported them.

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• Backup your Photos to CD


• Backup Monthly to Disk (CD or DVD)


• Get one Picture from a Backup


• Backup to External Hard Drive


• Exporting Pictures for Use in Another Program


• Using Albums for Organizing