Scrolling Through Your Picasa Lightbox
At most, the Picasa Lightbox shows only a few dozen thumbnails at a time; to see more, you need to scroll. Picasa’s scroll bar works differently from the standard Windows scroll bar. In the middle of the scroll bar is a single button with arrows pointing up and down. Drag the button, and the Lightbox scrolls through your photos. The farther you drag the button away from the center, the faster the thumbnails scroll by. When you release the button, it snaps back to the middle as though it’s spring loaded, and the thumbnails stop moving.
Picasa also has navigation buttons at the top and bottom of the scroll bar. The button that looks like an arrow scrolls the thumbnails a row at a time, while the button that looks like an equals sign scrolls the thumbnails a folder at a time.
1. Resizing thumbnails
Below the Lightbox is the slider control that adjusts the size of the thumbnails. For a clearer view of individual images, drag the slider to the right to make the thumbnails larger. Want to see more thumbnails per screen? Drag the slider to the left. If you’re searching for one photo among many similar shots, a larger thumbnail provides more detail. When you’re sequencing dozens of photos, you may want to fill the screen with as many thumbnails as possible.
The Lightbox’s scroll bar is a quickand funway to sprint through all the thumbnails of your photo library. Drag the large button with the arrows in the center of the scroll bar to start the scrolling, and release it to stop. Here, the cursor arrow points to the position bar, which indicates how close you are to the top or bottom of your photo library.
2. Moving thumbnails within and between folders
Say you want to arrange shots of your winter trip to the Bahamas in chronological order: arrival, the first night, day at the beach, and so on. You can rearrange photos within a folder to your heart’s desire. Simply drag thumbnails to the desired position in the Lightbox.
Moving a thumbnail to a different folder, though, is a little more complicated:
a. Select one or more of the thumbnails that you want to move.
Click to select a single thumbnail and Picasa highlights the image with a border, to show that it’s selected. You can also Shift+click to select a group of adjacent photos or Ctrl+click to select random images.
b. Drag the thumbnail or group of thumbnails to a different folder in the Folder List.
If the destination folder isn’t visible, find it using the Folder List’s scroll bar (between the Folder List and the Lightbox). To move a group of selected thumbnails, just drag any one of them and the rest come along.
When you try to drag a thumbnail to a different folder, Picasa sends up a warning. A message box asks you to confirm the move, reminding you that in addition to moving files within Picasa, you’re also moving files from one folder to another on your computer.
c. If you’re sure about the move, click Yes in the Confirm Move box.
Moving thumbnails from one folder to another is a simple click and drag operation. To expose the destination folder, use the Folder List scroll bar between the Lightbox and Folder List. You see the selected thumbnails move as you drag them to the folder.
3. Deleting photos
When you delete a photo from the Lightbox, Picasa banishes it to the Windows Recycle Bin. Although you can often rescue deleted photos, use the same caution deleting photos in Picasa as when deleting them from your hard drive window. If you’re sure you don’t want to keep that closeup of your thumbtip, here’s how to delete it:
- Select, and then right-click, the photo(s) you want to delete. The shortcut menu shows several options related to photos and thumbnails.
- Near the bottom of the list, click Delete From Disk. Your thumbnail disappears from the Lightbox. Picasa moves the photo file from its folder and into the Recycle Bin.
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Tip: The length of time a file remains in the Recycle Bin depends on your computer settings. Usually, you have at least a day or two to restore it.
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