Most Picasa Web Albums downloaders allow downloads only for photos from public web albums which is understandable as the user would need to be authenticated before downloading private photos from the photo hosting service.

The following list contains a review of several Google Picasa Web Albums download tools.

Google Picasa Downloader

This downloader is very easy to setup and use. All the user needs to do is to enter a Picasa username into the only form in the interface. The program will then pull all public web albums from that user and display them in list form. Some or all albums can then be selected and downloaded with a click on the download button.

download link

Photo Downloader

Photo Downloader can be used to download photos from Facebook or Picasa Web Albums. The Open Source software has not been updated for a while and some users have reported that it is not working for them anymore. It uses the same way of downloading photos from Picasa as the Google Picasa Downloader.

download link

Picasa Album Downloader

Picasa Downloader is an Open Source program. The difference to the two previous applications is the fact that it will display a thumbnail preview of each web album. It can on the other hand only be used to download one web album at a time.

download link

Down Them All for Firefox

The advantage of using this Firefox add-on is the fact that it is operating system independent. It uses the RSS feed of each Picasa Web Album. All that needs to be done is to display the RSS feed of the web album which can then be downloaded with Down Them all by right-clicking on that page and selecting the Down them All option from the context menu.

download link

The process obviously requires authentication and that’s the first step in the process. After picking one of the available image hosting sites the user has to enter his login credentials to for authentication purposes.

Once the credentials have been supplied Migratr begins to download all photos from the selected image host to the local computer. Another authentication is required to be able to export the photos again to the new image hosting site.

And thus the authentication process begins anew. After that it’s just a matter of selecting the folder where the photos have been saved into and hitting the Start Export button. The software works pretty well and I did not experience any problems while using it.

It provides a nice way to backup your photos from those image hosting sites if you just complete the first three steps of the procedure.

Migratr requires the Windows .net framework 3.5 and should be running on pretty much every Windows NT compatible operating system. Tried and tested on Windows XP where it worked fine.