PC Picasa Photos to iMac

Hi, I have recently purchased an iMac and I'd like to know the easiest way to transfer my current photos (i'd say about 150Gs worth) which are on Picasa which is on a PC. I would really like it if all my current albums could seamlessly be exported to the Mac.

I plan on saving all the photos on an external drive. I am not sure what the best way is to do that. I am sure I can drag and drop from Picasa but I have heard that some people go thru the Windows File System.

Once I have the photos on the external drive I need to know the best way to get them on the Mac. - I am not sure if I should download Picasa on the Mac or if iphoto would recognize the album names and content. Any help would be appreciated,

Thanks DLD

Try the Picassa backup route and see if it works cross platform

Move Pictures to a New Computer » Picasa Tutorials

With 150 GB of photos to transfer you need to be especially careful about not causing any corruption of the data. I would transfer them to an external hard drive formatted to the preferred Mac file format which is HFS Extended Journaled. You can use FAT-32 if you like but Windows will not format a drive greater than 32 GB to FAT-32. Do not use NTFS as the Mac will only be able to read but not natively write to the drive.

And, leave them on the external drive. You can point iPhoto to the external drive which it can use as its library. You don't need Picasa for the Mac as iPhoto is much better at editing and handling photos.

Do not erase anything from the PC until you have confirmed that everything was transferred and working correctly.

Hi, I am not sure what HFS is. I have a 156GB external flash drive (crazy how much memory they put on those things now).... anyway its just a standard drive. Are you saying I need to format the drive ?? .. I am not sure how I would do that...also I don't know what FAT - 32 is. -- Sorry, my tech vocab is a bit dated. - That is a very good idea... I actually will keep the photos on my soon to be decommished PC. I always make sure to have all my Pics backed up..... Thanks again for the help

Thanks... I will look into that !! - not sure if i can backup photos and then put them on iphoto... would you download picasa for mac if i was going to take the backup route ?

Thanks again

Your large flash drive is likely formatted to FAT-32 so it should be OK to use as a transfer medium or for storage of the iPhoto library.

Since Picasa for the Mac is free you've nothing to lose by downloading it, but personally, I prefer using iPhoto over Picasa. Both Picasa and iPhoto have basic editing capability but iPhoto is much better at organizing and protecting your photos from accidental deletion than Picasa.