PICASA: Restoring Albums from backup

I love Picasa as a photo (and video) organiser. And I especially love how easy it is to put your photos on the web as albums (with no advertising!). It only takes a few clicks and a whole Picasa album is then available for friends and family to see.

And although I had backed up all my photos (probably the most precious items on my machine when I think about it) I had never thought about backing up the album definitions. So, following my recent crash, after restoring my last 3 year’s worth of photos I was dreading the task of having to build all my albums again.

Luckily though, the solution was close at hand: the albums are stored in .pal files. Fortunately my backup was a complete backup of my Documents and Settings directory, so after digging down through the folders I was able to restore all my .pal files easily. Let the rejoicing begin.

So… just thought I’d mention it here in case anyone else lands in this situation.