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Picasa is being phased out by Google. Unfortunately I have a lot of data in Picasa. Most important for me to preserve/export is the photos that have stars.

Picasa stores this in a little text file called .picasa.ini in each folder of photos which has a very simple format (the name of the photo in square brackets, followed by "star=yes".

I am looking for a way to convert these files into something that's readable by other software, ideally a star rating in each photo file's EXIF data.

Is there a tool or some other way to do this for a hard drive full of thousands of folders of photos?

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This seems to work: There is an album in Picasa called "Starred Photos." You can select all the photos in that album. Then apply a TAG to the photos in the tags sidebar. Boom, this tag can be read by Lightroom, Bridge, or most any other photo editing program, where you can select all the photos and apply the star rating of your choice.

I've been thinking about this problem for months, and discovered this solution a few minutes after asking here!

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Nice catch. Star ratings are not an exif category, and not even IPTC I believe. So keywords are a good way to go since every image application can read them from IPTC. And BTW, XnViewMP is a nice little browser that is good at keywording, and can even do hierarchical keywords. Might help as well. \$\endgroup\$
    – 211Oakland
    Commented Apr 14, 2016 at 16:37
  • \$\begingroup\$ @211Oakland Hmm... I wonder how, say, Adobe Bridge stores star ratings? In the Metadata panel the rating shows up (as a number) in the File properties. I believe that number is in some way or other stored in the file, no? \$\endgroup\$
    – Alesh Houdek
    Commented Apr 14, 2016 at 18:03
  • \$\begingroup\$ star ratings are stored in XMP:Rating field as a float number. \$\endgroup\$
    – Murat - Daminion Software
    Commented Apr 15, 2016 at 15:10
  • \$\begingroup\$ So yeah, depending on the program you're moving to (XnViewMP looks interesting and is multi-platform) you can do whatever works best with the tags. I'm actually having a problem reading the tag assigned by Picasa in Bridge, but i'm probably just missing something obvious. On and also the "show items from subfolders" setting in Bridge CS6 at least is extremely flaky. \$\endgroup\$
    – Alesh Houdek
    Commented Apr 20, 2016 at 15:16
  • \$\begingroup\$ Is there a way to have Picasa store the favorite, as say 5.0 stars, in the XMP:Rating field? \$\endgroup\$
    – Scott
    Commented Jul 10, 2019 at 16:22

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