How to change the default Picasa cache directory?

I love Picasa! So what… I am having now around 30,000 photos (at least if Picasa doesn’t lie) and… a problem. Picasa for ages have a problem with big database caching file.  I have a system partition that is only 20GB in size. The problem is that Picasa is holding the thumbnails cached in my home directory that is on the system drive..

With this amount of photos, and a lot of software installed, it had filled my partition effectively. So, one solution is to resize the partition, but I didn’t want that. The other solution I thought of was… symlinks that I love in linux.

Because I had a second big disk available, I wanted to move the whole picture cache database to the other disk. The problem is that Windows XP as such does not support symbolic links. But … it was easy anyway. Want to know how?

  1. To solve this problem I had to download the Junction utility that is officially available from Microsoft, a tiny thingie to make symlinking possible :) Unpack it somewhere, e.g. to C:\.
  2. Then, create a directory on your other bigger drive that you will keep the picasa stuff in. Let’s say this will be D:\MyPicasa.
  3. Move all the things from the previous directory of Picasa to the new one, usually that’s in “C:\Documents and Settings\warden\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Picasa2″.
  4. Delete the empty directory afterwards.
  5. Now we will use the junction utility. Then go into command line… Start->Run->cmd and type:
C:\> junction.exe "C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Picasa2" D:\MyPicasa

Junction v1.05 - Windows junction creator and reparse point viewer
Copyright (C) 2000-2007 Mark Russinovich
Systems Internals - http://www.sysinternals.com

Created: C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Picasa2
Targetted at: D:\MyPicasa

Remember to copy in the proper path here (username). That’s it! Now you can run Picasa, and all your things will be stored in the new directory.

8 Responses to “How to change the default Picasa cache directory?”

  1. Val Says:

    Although your technique works, you should consider rephrasing some of the steps.

    The description is quite hard to follow:
    In step 2, you say “create D:\MyPicasa”.
    Step 3 seems to indicate that the user should copy everything from “D:\MyPicasa” to “C:\…\Picasa2″, when actually it is the other way around. You should consider rephrasing this with more logic.

    Considering the reader actually understood what to copy from which folder to which, there is still one more issue:

    In step 2 you create a new folder
    In step 3 you COPY everything from the C:\…\Picasa2 to the folder created in step 2. Now you have all files in TWO places hence:
    In step 4 you say “delete the empty directory afterward”. There is no empty directory as the previous step required the files to be copied from one place to another. This makes it hard for the reader to understand which directory to delete, especially since step 3 makes such a poor job of describing which is the source and which is the destination of the copy action…

    Sorry if I sound rude, but the text is very hard to follow, illogical even. You should consider rewriting the 3rd and 4th steps.

  2. Radek Says:

    Thanks a lot, I’ll fix to be more clear :)
    Glad it helped!
    I have renamed “copy” to “move”. That was the problem I think :)

  3. Sir Athos Says:

    Thank you VERY much. This was the missing link (pun intended) that I was looking for!

  4. Nikhil Says:

    Wow this is extremely powerful… 2 thunbs up…
    After doing the deed, when I clicked my way through to the folder, it displayed the TARGET folder’s contents without skipping a beat; and even in the subfolders the full path gave the impression everything was still in its original place! I was only convinced there’s been a symbolic link when I created a new file in the new path and saw it get ghost-reflected to the old!
    Note: Do not keep the source folder (1st arg) open in explorer or in any other way; when you’re running the command.

  5. reijo marjanen Says:

    After creating the junction I checked it with junction.exe -s and it shows that there is the junction at the original location and the substitute new location. But the full picasa2 is back in original location and the cache content in both locations is the same; The content of the new location is copied to the original place. If I delete a file in new location it is deleted also in the original location. If I try to delete file in original location it is inhibited.
    So I get Picasa data in new disk location but it does not help, because it is also in the original location in c:.

  6. Radek Says:

    You see the files on both locations, but they are not on the volume from which you are linking. You can see that by the amount of free space.
    If you don’t, then surely you have done something wrong :-)

  7. reijo marjanen Says:

    Thank you for a fast rection to my question. You are right. I just didnt realise it. I am happy now.

  8. xaero Says:

    Hi u guys I got something to add:
    if the path contains SPACE(s), you should quotation mark it, if you don’t do that, junction won’t work
    for example:
    WRONG: junction.exe c:\program files\microsoft sdks g:\sdks
    or
    junction.exe “c:\program files\microsoft sdks” g:\microsoft sdks

    RIGHT: junction.exe “c:\program files\microsoft sdks” g:\sdks
    and
    junction.exe “c:\program files\microsoft sdks” “g:\microsoft sdks”

    enjoy it~

Leave a Reply