2009/06/01

Picasa - Delete Annoying ".picasaoriginals" Space Consuming Folders

Did you ever notice that Picasa creates a backup of any picture that has been modified? I could never find an option to suppress that behavior. I mean, I know what I am doing; I do not want to have extra copies of my pictures laying around and taking up all my disk space.

So I built a small applicaiton that lists the ".picasaoriginals" folders location under the folder where the Python script is run from. It lists the content of the ".picasaoriginals" and prompts the user for deletion. You can view the code here. It is only a few dozens lines long so just copy/paste to a .py file if you want to use it. It is written in a Python 3.0.

Here is an example of the command-prompt interation with the program.
python DelPicasaOriginalBackups.py

Folder:
C:\pics\09-01-03 - Montreal\.picasaoriginals
Content:
{IMG_7432.jpg,IMG_7433.jpg,IMG_7434.jpg}

Do you want to delete the following folder and everything in sub-dirs?
C:\pics\09-01-03 - Montreal\.picasaoriginals
N/Y?
Hope it is useful. Feel free to post any comment/suggestion.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just to let you know, I believe they say on their website that these folders are actually your original photo! I'm going through and trying to undo all my edits, but I'm just going to move these files back to their original locations. I'm just having a hard time figuring out how to find them other than going to the photo in picasa and right-clicking to "show in finder"

David said...

Yeah, you could use the scrip for that; just make sure you removed the lines that delete the files.

(
e.g.:
shutil.rmtree(_Folder)
and/or
just make sure the function:
"DeleteFolderAndSubIfUserManuallyAgrees(...)" does not do anything :P
)

good luck!

Harry said...

Hi David,

your script is exactly what i've been looking for. Thanks for sharing it. The only problem is that i've never used python before so didn't manage to get it to work properly. This is what came up when I tried to execute it:

Actually i can't show you because I've just been told "Your HTML cannot be accepted: Tag is not allowed: module". I think this blog won't allow me to include the text that was outputted by my attempt at using your script...

Could you email me so that I can email you what I got?

Thanks in advance!

Harry.

David said...

@Harry

errr.. can't e-mail directly (don't have your e-mail).

You probably don't have the right version (of python) installed. If you get a weird error about the print function, then definitely install python 3.x.

I suggest you go to the python irc channel to address you question.

(See: http://www.python.org/community/irc/ ).

Good luck!

Harry said...

Thanks for your reply, Dave.

I assumed that because I entered my email address to submit my earlier comment, you'd be able to see it.

I've posted a screenshot of what I get here:

http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/1196/screenshot20090918at054.png

My python version is 3.0.1 for Mac.

Thanks,

Harry