How to access the Picasa (desktop) database?

database, picasa

Solution

In Picasa 3 at least, the internal database is stored in a set of `.pmp` files that sits alongside the `.db` files, in one of the standard locations for Picasa's application data. On the Mac for instance, it is under `$HOME/Library/Application Support/Google/Picasa3/db3`

Rather confusingly, the `.db` files don't contain the database, they are just containers that hold thumbnail previews for various groups of images. They are in the standard Windows `thumbs.db` format, more information from this answer.

The `.pmp` files contain the database, and are in a non-standard format. There is a cluster of files per table, with one file per field. The filenames for a given table share the same prefix. For example, the data in the `catdata` table comes from this set of files:

$ ls -1 catdata_*
catdata_0
catdata_catpri.pmp
catdata_name.pmp
catdata_state.pmp

which has three fields, `catpri`, `name` and `state`. I've written up some partial notes in a blog on the format of these files as of Picasa 3.9.0.522, as well as a small java program to dump out as much of the data as I've been able to understand.

Problem

Original source