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Import full-size pictures from Picasa Web Albums into iPhoto

Import full-size pictures from Picasa Web Albums into iPhoto

Google’s Picasa is a popular way for people to organize, upload, and share their photos. Once they’re all uploaded into a Web Album, though, it can be a challenge to get them into Apple’s iPhoto software.

Let’s say you just came back from a group vacation and one of your buddies uploaded all of his pictures from the trip to Picasa Web Albums. Or maybe photos from a family gathering were posted online by a relative. Google’s website lets people view the photos easily, but downloading them to your Mac (and your iPhoto library) is another story – unless you want to save them one at a time. But who can realistically do that for an album containing 400 images?

Luckily, Picasa Web Albums have RSS feeds which can be subscribed to directly in iPhoto. The feed downloads the high-resolution pictures (with EXIF data) to iPhoto, where they can be organized into events, albums, etc. Follow these steps to import an entire Picasa gallery into iPhoto on your Mac:

  1. Go to the specific gallery on Google’s Picasa Web Albums that you want to download images from. For example, http://picasaweb.google.com/USERNAME/GALLERYNAME.
  2. On the right side of the page, you will see a link that says RSS. Right-click this link and select “Copy Link” (Safari) or “Copy Link Location” (Firefox).
  3. Launch iPhoto and select File > Subscribe to Photo Feed in the menu bar.
  4. Paste the URL of the RSS feed you copied in step 2, then add &imgmax=d&max-results=10000 to the end. This string of text tells iPhoto to download all of the original pictures in the gallery at full-size rather than the default max of 1600×1600.
  5. Click the Subscribe button and the images will slowly appear in iPhoto. Bear in mind, this could take a while depending on the number of photos and the size of each file. It might be best to get up and do something else as it chugs along.

Once downloading of the images has completed, you may organize and manipulate them like any other content in your iPhoto library.

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9 Comments Have Been Posted (Leave Your Response)

Great bit of information, just saved me hours of typing photo titles in iphoto – Thanks!

As a big Mac fan I can just say thank you for your information! It´s amazing to see how everything can actually work together.

Thanks for the great information. I wanted to add that the Picasa Web Album should be “public”. When I had access set as “Limited, anyone with link can access”, I would get an error in iPhoto that it was not able to connect. Switching the album to public did the trick.

Great and clear article. Thanks a million!! and … my 12 year old daughter is very grateful to you. I was just about to assign her the task of downloading 157 photos from Picasa one at a time! Now, she is free to watch TV instead. Hmmm.

Thank you so much for this tip, it saved TONS of time!!

Thanks for this article. It has been driving me crazy all evening trying to download full size and multiple photos.

Thanks soooo much! I’m not tech savvy and was trying to figure this thing out for hours. You’re amazing!

This is just what I wanted to do having lost some photos, but I cant find the option to File > Subscribe to Photo Feed in iPhoto. Can you offer any advice?

Ahhh, saved me manually downloading one file at a time from a friend’s Picasa album, so grateful for this!