Moving Picasa photos and data

We just bought a new laptop for my wife, and we decided to do two things with our family photos and videos:
1. Copy Picasa data (including albums (virtual folders), settings, starred photos, etc) to the new laptop from the old
2. Move the physical location of the photos/videos from a Linux NSLU2 (aka the Slug) network storage device to the hard drive of the new laptop. It's about 60GB of data, roughly 14,000 files.

First of all, some links that helped me to understand what is going on under the hood of Picasa:
Richard's Tech Reviews: Picasa, a network drive and the lost folders
Backup and Restore Picasa (settings only not pictures)

To sum it up, if you are just moving pictures but don't use Picasa "albums", it's not too difficult. The picasa.ini files in the respective picture folders contain all the meta data about what edits you have made to the pictures. But in our case, we do use albums (quite a few), so we needed to move the album meta data as well. If you need to do this, you'll find yourself in one of two situations:

In the simple situation, you will have the same pathnames to files in the new computer as you had on the old. In this case, moving the albums is rather simple: just do a backup from within Picasa without clicking any photos (a dataless backup, if you will). Every backup contains the album meta data. Then, on the new computer, you run the PicasaRestore.exe executable that was created by the backup. The albums are restored.

But in our situation, we wanted to move the location of the files as well. The files used to be stored under N:\Pictures (the Slug network path). We wanted them to be stored under my wife's "My Pictures" directory. The Picasa albums have hardcoded pathnames to the pictures in the old locations, so there's much more work to be done.

Step 1 was to copy the data. This turned out to be a project all on its own, due to the fact that the external hard drive attached to the Slug was formatted as an ext3 file system. Anyway, I eventually got the N:\Pictures directory copied to C:\SlugCopy\Pictures.

Once I had all the data copied, I used the "subst" DOS command to create a virtual drive called N: on the new laptop that pointed to C:\SlugCopy\Pictures. I did this by running (from a command line): "subst N: C:\SlugCopy"

At this point, I had what looked to be the old Slug network path, but it was actually just a pointer to the files on the local drive.

Next, I used the Picasa backup feature to create a backup on the old laptop. I could have done a dataless backup, but I didn't know that at the time, so I instead backed up one small folder with 4 pictures.

I copied the backup to the new laptop, then ran the PicaseRestore.exe file created by the backup. This effectively copied all the Picasa album meta data to the new laptop.

Next, I downloaded and installed Picasa (it was version 3.6) on the new laptop. I then started Picasa, and it automatically rebuilt its database with all the albums included! I then had to manually add the N:\Pictures folder, and Picasa correctly imported the rest of the folders and individual picture meta data.

At this stage, everything is running on the new laptop, but Picasa is still using the N:\Pictures path, and the pictures are still physically stored at C:\SlugCopy\Pictures. How to move the pictures to my wife's "My Pictures" folder? And how to get Picasa to understand the move and update the albums?

I basically had two choices:
1) Move all the files myself, then edit Picasa album database files by hand. Yuck. This is feasible but definitely not recommended to monkey with things in an unsupported way.
2) Move the folders from within Picasa itself, so that it would update the albums automatically

I chose option 2. The trick for moving the "Pictures" root directory itself in one big bang was to click View->Folder View and change the folder view to tree view. Then I right-clicked the Pictures folder and told Picasa to move the folder to my wife's "My Pictures" directory.

One small problem I didn't anticipate was that this wasn't a simple "move" folder operation, but rather a gigantic copy-everything-from-here-to-there-and-delete-it-when-done operation. I think this was because it appeared like I was moving files across file systems since it was going from N: to C: (never mind that the files were physically on C:). Whatever the reason, it took a good two hours or so to move the files.

But when it was finished, VIOLA! The pictures were finally in their ultimate destination, Picasa was happy, the albums pointed to the pictures in their new location, and the job was complete.

Hope this helps somebody! During my investigation, I saw a lot of threads with people trying to figure stuff like this out.