When we got our Windows 7 PC’s earlier in the year, I was really careful to take backups of absolutely everything before we wiped our old PC’s.  In fact, I ended up with about 3 backups of everything in several locations.  However, due to some issues with hardware, messing about, and frustration, I ended up losing my Picasa albums.  Not the ones on the web, but the definitions of albums on local disk.

I wasn’t too worried initially, I had all the photo’s.  Over time though I got more and more annoyed that there’s no easy way to re-link a web based album with Picasa on the PC.  No way to say – import this album and it’s settings, and relink to all the photos.  Very annoying.

Every time I start up Picasa I get a little twinge of annoyance.  Since I was painting some mini’s today and taking pictures, I’ve been starting Picasa a lot.

So I finally knuckled down, ransacked Google and my backups, and have restored all but one of the albums! Yay, success.  Picasa backups up the .pal files which represent the albums, and with some arcane copying too and fro you can convince Picasa to recreate them, although the behaviour seems inconsistent.  No idea why one of them didn’t work – but much easier to rebuild one album manually than 10, and now they’re all back fully synced and online.