If you use Google Picasa to handle your images you might have spend time tagging information about people on the images. Today I discovered a nice free utility which can merge information about your friends from Facebook with the contact data keept within Google Picasa, giving you more correct tagging information inside your local Picasa albums.

Go download the utility: “Facebook Contacts for Picasa”

You need only do a few simple things to do the merging job. First of all you will need to download the “Facebook Contacts for Picasa” from SourceForge.

Run the utility!

When you have finished downloading the utility, simply run it. You will get the screen below:

The steps to follow inside the utility

• Get the facebook contacts simply by clicking the button “Get Facebook Contacts” and identify yourself (log in – may be nessesary).
  That will get the information about your friends from facebook and put them in the list to the left (blured in the image above).
• You then need to locate the “contacts.xml” which Picasa uses. It should be somewhere within “Local Settings/Application Data/Google/Picasa2”. I found mine here: “C:\Users\Sten\AppData\Local\Google\Picasa2\contacts\contacts.xml”. Be sure to make a backup of that file – the contacts.xml file.
• Press the “Get Picasa Contacts” to fill out the dropdown box to the right of “Merge With”. That dropdown will contain the local contacts which you may allready have created.
• Manually go through the list to the left – the one from facebook. The Utility may or may not have found a match. So I suggest that you go through them. This feature has however a strange behaviour! It seems that after each time you manually select a contact from the “Merge with” list, you have to save it… Hmm… It however seems to work, though not as I expected.

  I expected that going through the list and choosing which person from facebook to merge to which Picasa contact, the relation was remembered and all of the relations then saved after I had finished them all and pressed save…

You are now ready to Save the data to the Google Picasa contacts.xml file! But as I suggested above, do make a copy of the contacts.xml before saving!

If everything went okay you should now have more accurate information inside your local Google Picasa gallery! You can now tag people using those data inside your picasa library.

Links

• Use Google Picasa to generate webgalleries using templates
• Using Google Picasa to generate cool webgalleries
• Get “Facebook Contacts for Picasa” from SourceForge