I’ve been using Google’s Picasa for years. It’s a very efficient tool for sorting, cropping, and otherwise tweaking images, and it’s integrated with Google’s online photo album and Google’s YouTube service, so it’s very convenient. It’s also behaving very strangely.
After I updated recently to Picass 3, I notice that, every second the program is active, it dumps a 3-megabyte screen capture into a “My Pictures/Picasa/Screen Capture” folder, which very soon fills up my hard drive. Here’s the screen capture Google took when I noticed that the folder contained a screen capture of me looking at the screen capture folder.
I’m using a brand new Dell Latitude XT Tablet PC with Windows XP service Pack 3 (for anyone out there who might be searching online for those terms). I’ve dutifully checked the forums, and I wonder if the problem is something related to the way my Latitude XT treats the “PrtScn” button. One poster said that the Picasa screen capturing starts when you push shift-insert (which I do all the time when I’m editing).
It looks like the only way to remove this behavior is to re-install the older Picasa 2.7 (which I have done). No more Picasa upgrades for me anytime soon.
Wow, thanks. There were a few features of Picasa 3 that I missed when I had to roll it back, so I will give this a shot.
I may have the answer for you. I have done what you did and rolled back to Picasa 2.7 after having the same issues with the screen capture. I too had a hard time with searching for the answer. I recently installed Picasa 3 on a new PC and started having the issue all over again. I was a little frustrated that this issue had not been patched yet. So I played around with the tools options menu thinking I would find a way to turn this feature off there to no avail. But then I saw another option under the tools menu called Folder Manager. Then I drilled down to the Picasa\ Screen Captures folder options and changed the setting from scan always to remove from Picasa. So far this seems to fix the issue. I have checked this folder under My Documents\ My Pictures\ Picasa\ Screen Captures and no new images have been captured after I turned this feature off.