Import full-size pictures from Picasa Web Albums into iPhoto

Google’s Picasa is a popular way for people to organize, upload, and share their photos. Once they’re all uploaded into a Web Album, though, it can be a challenge to get them into Apple’s iPhoto software.

Let’s say you just came back from a group vacation and one of your buddies uploaded all of his pictures from the trip to Picasa Web Albums. Or maybe photos from a family gathering were posted online by a relative. Google’s website lets people view the photos easily, but downloading them to your Mac (and your iPhoto library) is another story – unless you want to save them one at a time. But who can realistically do that for an album containing 400 images?

Luckily, Picasa Web Albums have RSS feeds which can be subscribed to directly in iPhoto. The feed downloads the high-resolution pictures (with EXIF data) to iPhoto, where they can be organized into events, albums, etc. Follow these steps to import an entire Picasa gallery into iPhoto on your Mac:

1. Go to the specific gallery on Google’s Picasa Web Albums that you want to download images from. For example, http://picasaweb.google.com/USERNAME/GALLERYNAME.
2. On the right side of the page, you will see a link that says RSS. Right-click this link and select “Copy Link” (Safari) or “Copy Link Location” (Firefox).
3. Launch iPhoto and select File > Subscribe to Photo Feed in the menu bar.
4. Paste the URL of the RSS feed you copied in step 2, then add &imgmax=d&max-results=10000 to the end. This string of text tells iPhoto to download all of the original pictures in the gallery at full-size rather than the default max of 1600×1600.
5. Click the Subscribe button and the images will slowly appear in iPhoto. Bear in mind, this could take a while depending on the number of photos and the size of each file. It might be best to get up and do something else as it chugs along.

Once downloading of the images has completed, you may organize and manipulate them like any other content in your iPhoto library.