Nithin Kamath's Weblog

I have been using Firefox for as long as I can remember, but lately I had been facing a issue of Firefox taking around 5-10 seconds to exit when I closed it. I had been lazy to look up and resolve this issue, but today I finally got down to it.

After searching and reading lots of sites, wherein most of them pointed to some issue with the extensions. So one option was to disable all the extensions and enable them one by one and test to see which one was causing the problem. But this would take a lot of time. And most of the sites had users who mentioned the extensions they were using and they had tested them, so all the extensions I use were listed there. So I was pretty much sure extensions were not an issue.

Then on one site it was mentioned that this could be caused by a plugin like Flash. This is when I noticed that I had only a couple of plugins and I could test them in one go. So I disabled the Picasa plugin which I do not use much and restarted Firefox. Then closed it. Poof! It was gone immediately.

To confirm I open Firefox again, loaded a few pages closed some of them and exited Firefox again. Again, Poof! Immediately closed. So the slow exit was caused by the Picasa plugin which I was using. So much for the issues, one small plugin can cause so much slowdown in shutdown of an application. Looking forward to the next release of Firefox viz., 3.6. Hear it is a lot faster. Happy Browsing till then.

Which software comes to you mind when I mention ‘Photo Management’, yes Picasa!. Google has some time back launched Picasa 3.5 for Windows and MacOSx, but apparently due to the low adoption among Linux user they have not launched the ported version for Linux. So does this meant Linux users wont be able to use Picasa3.5? Don’t worry about it, since Google has not ported Picasa to native version we can just get the Windows version and run it under Wine.

But there are other methods as well, like the one I followed where you use the Wine supplied by the earlier install of Picasa. So if you are using the earlier Picasa 3x for Linux version then it is very simple if you have Windows installed in your system. Just follow the steps mentioned below:
[1] Download the latest version of Picasa 3.5 for Windows from the Picasa site.
[2] Install it under Windows,
[3] Issue “gksu nautilus” under terminal or if you are fine with using command prompt then skip this step.
[4] Rename the ‘Picasa3′ folder under ‘/opt/google/picasa/3.0/wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Google/’ to ‘Picasa3_old’.
[5] Copy the contents of the folder ‘Picasa3′ from your windows partition to the path mentioned in point 4. (The location where Picasa3 is installed in windows would probably be installed in ‘C:\Program Files\Google\’, so find where the partition is mounted in Linux, for me it is ‘/media/win_c’)
[6] You are done, enjoy using Picasa3.5 under Linux.

If you do not have Windows, then for step 2, you would have to install ‘Wine’ from your package repository and install Picasa3.5 executable using it. Then for step 4, the location would be ‘/home/YOUR_USER_NAME/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Google/’

Do let me know if you have any doubts using the comments section below.

Picasa3 for Linux is a good option for managing photos and for uploading photos to Picasa webalbums, but I am having problems with downloading the Albums using Picasa3, it generally downloads a couple of images from the album and then does not proceed. Even trying to close the download process hangs whole of Picasa and I have to kill the process to continue.

So I found a cool Add-on for Firefox called ‘DownThemAll!‘, it is basically a download manager which manages your downloads. You can follow the below mentioned steps to download Picasa webalbums using this plugin.

• Goto the photo album main page using either the public or the private link.
• Click on the RSS feed icon on the address bar.
• Once the RSS feed is loaded in Firefox, right click anywhere on the page and choose the ‘DownThemAll’ option and select the files you would like to download and where you would like to download them to.
• DownThemAll will do the rest of the work.

If you know of any better way of downloading the web albums let me know through the comments. Till then have a easy way out while downloading ablums from Picasa webalbums in Linux.