Picasa Web Downloader
I store all my memories on Picasa! Even spent a lot of time to scan all old pictures and upload them. Trusting a provider to keep your data safe from data loss is something that doesn’t make me sleep well at night. Even though I trust the guys at Google to take care of the data I want a backup. Before I used Backupify.com but they don’t provide this service anymore. The Picasa application it self is really bad! Maybe if your an old iTunes user you can figure out how it works? All kidding aside… It actually didn’t manage to download all my pictures and got some strange errors. So I looked around the internet for a third party application for downloading all my content but I couldn’t find anything useful!
I did how ever find a great application named Picasa Web Sync (http://www.geekytidbits.com/picasawebsync/) written by Brady Holt. Great peace of software for syncing up to Picasa but not the way I want to do it! So i started to check out the API for developing my own application, I took a quick look at the Google API Client Libraries. Not that surprising the java and python libraries was awesome and complete. The .Net C# however is not that good! There are things missing and stuff that doesn’t work, spelling mistakes and so on. Google usually delivers above and beyond but in this case not so much.
How ever I started to code and used what I could from the client libraries, mostly to parse the feeds from the API. Then I realized there was a load of videos in my albums so I started to try to download them. Nothing in the documentation, that I could find anyway. But I found a way to do it and now I have a complete offline backup of my Picasa Web Albums, on a USB drive… Encrypted of course!
So the first working version of this console application is available for download! Written in c# and source will be posted soon for those who like that.
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Hackviking aka Kristofer Källsbo 
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