I am totally confused by Picasa. I am pulling my hair but just cannot do one simple thing: copy my pictures from the camera to the folder and yes, I do need to know where this folder is located.

Its menu is confusing and incomplete. I have never thought of such a billion dollar geek company can develope something ****** as this. Do they seriously think every user is a freak that knows all its "hiden functions" automatically? It's just going to another extrem end of Microsoft. While Bill's people think everyone is idiot and they need to teach you everything. THe Google gang seem to willing to hide everything so you will enjoy the happiness of not knowing a thing about their product.

When you plug in your camera (before picasa), does it appear as a drive letter, or did you ahve to use special software to get the photos off?

My wife uses it and loves it. She's got a card reader, so she puts the CF card in there and Picasa pops up to import. The photos go into a folder of the day's date in the My Pictures folder.

IIRC, the option of where to save might be in the pop-up box that appears when it detects the card.

Oh, if you get it working, something it sounds like you need to understand - when you edit in picasa, it doesn't actually alter the file. Picasa just keeps a database of the changes, which is nice cause they're always undoable later. However, if you open the photo in other software, your edits aren't there.

The trick is, there's a button with each group of photos in the browser to save changes, when you click that, it saves the changes to the "main" file, but makes a backup of the original in a hidden folder so it can still undo later.

Are you using picasa to copy the pictures from your camera, or some other software (such as the Microsoft Camera & Scanner Wizard)?

Picasa should default to copying the pictures to your "My Pictures" directory. You can check this setting by clicking on "Tools->Options" in Picasa.

To find out where a particular picture lives, you can right-click it within picasa, then choose "Locate on Disk".

When I plug my camera into the computer, Picasa started to read the SD card. It was a good thing, cause I found out the software can actually read files that have been "deleted" from the card a while ago. However, when the harddisc light is blinking like crazy for 5 minutes and the progress bar still going from left to right, I have NO IDEA what the software is doing or where it is copying all the files to. Left click, right click, none of them work. Picasa is just like saying, You let me finish what I am doing, yet I don't have to tell you what I am doing.

I've been beta testing this new service:
http://www.photosleeve.com

and they feature:
* Zero-click upload. Plug in your camera and we can automatically upload your photos. Clicking is strictly optional. :-)
* Less waiting. We upload smaller copies of your photos first, so there’s less waiting between plugging in your camera and sharing with your friends and family.
* Drag-and-drop interface. Use drag-and-drop to perform a variety of actions like sending email or publishing to Facebook. More to come.
* No more lost photos. We save the original photos from your digital camera, preserving all the details for when you need them.