Help! Where did my Picasa photos go?

A reader is searching for 12,000 missing photos:

“I’m switching from a desktop PC to a laptop (HP Pavilion), and one of my biggest headaches right now is my photos. I have about 12,000 photos which are all in Picasa. My tech person transferred the photos to the laptop, but it appears that only the original photo, and none of my edits, sorted albums, etc. transferred. Short of redoing everything, is there any way of getting all of this to transfer? I’m hoping you’ll have some positive information.”

There are two places where you can look for your images.  Your Picassa images should have transferred straight to Google Photos.  Follow this link to look for them:

https://photos.google.com/

Your archived files that contain information like tags and captions should still be available at this link: https://get.google.com/albumarchive/

If you had the Picassa app installed on your PC and downloaded your images, there’s another place to look.  When your tech copied the photos, most likely he/she might have only copied your Photos library where the vast majority of images would be stored. Here’s how to copy all of the information for the photos in the Picassa app.

You’ll want to follow the path: c:\users\yourusername\appdata\local\google and copy the two subfolders Picasa2Albums and Picasa2.

On your old desktop PC, open File Explorer and click on the C Drive (or whatever your hard drive was called).

Then choose Users.

Select your name. I will be some version of your Windows username on the PC.

Then pick AppData

Next click on Local.

Find the Picasa albums and copy them to your a drive for transfer to your new computer.