Google Picasa 2 (some questions)

[Sweet Spot]

Thanks to a recommendation by someone in this community, I tried out Picasa for myself, and think that it's a really great photo storage and editing program. So much so, that I also downloaded it for my wife's laptop which is running XP. She agrees, that it's a fantastic program, especially for her 'type' (not so tech savvy).

Now: I get home, and she's got a CD in her laptop CD drive, which is filled with pics that she want to choose from, and import to her picture folder on her C drive. Easy enough. To note, there are a bit over 400 photos on the CD. I then noticed that she was selecting files individually, then choosing 'file>save as', rather than what I think would be a better way of doing it, which is by having the thumbnails be a bit larger, seeing which ones you want, then using ctrl to highlight those you want to import and doing so.

Now however, I can't even get the individual pics from the import tray to save to any folder by using the method she was using. Every menu is grayed out, non selectable...except for the options selection. I don't know what I did for this to happen, but I even tried restarting the program, which was useless.

Besides that, I would like to know if it IS indeed possible to get the thumbnails within the import tray to zoom a bit, so that I/she may ctrl click specific ones for the import process. I don't see this option anywhere, but this could also be because everything is grayed out.

I'd really appreciate some help with this, please. BTW, this version of Picasa is running on her XP Pro (SP1), old as hell laptop.

Doug

[FyreBrand]

As far as I know you can't change the thumbnail size in the import tray. The import tray is a fine way to import, but just transferring the files to watched folders will work just the same way. When you copy a file into a watched folder Picasa will pick it up and add it to folders view. For a Windows machine I think it's the best photo album tool there is. It's also cool how it integrates into blogspot, picasa web, or your google website. Pretty neat.

[Sweet Spot]

Yes but, the watched folders are only useful if you want to import ALL the files in which ever folders you've chosen to have watched. My wife only wants specific files from the cd to put on her hard drive, not all 409 of them, so this would be a problem. Besides, she only has a 20 gig hard drive on this thing....

Also, having the import tray would seem very redundant if it only worked in the same way which watched folders did, hence the reason I thought that the import tray was able to do what I am requesting. It only seems logical. Any ideas about why my menus would be grayed out ?

[karellen]

Yes but, the watched folders are only useful if you want to import ALL the files in which ever folders you've chosen to have watched. My wife only wants specific files from the cd to put on her hard drive, not all 409 of them, so this would be a problem. Besides, she only has a 20 gig hard drive on this thing....

Also, having the import tray would seem very redundant if it only worked in the same way which watched folders did, hence the reason I thought that the import tray was able to do what I am requesting. It only seems logical. Any ideas about why my menus would be grayed out ?

because the linux version of picasa lacks some features of the windows version

[Sweet Spot]

because the linux version of picasa lacks some features of the windows version

Actually, I was talking about the XP Pro version which I had set up on my wifes laptop. Someone else told me that it simply wasn't an option. It should be, since all I'm asking for is to be able to zoom in on the thumbnails in the preview/import tray.