Picasa 3.9.0 strips all Exif information after saving photos to computer?

Picasa just reads your pictures on your harddrive, so the pictures are already on your harddrive. Are you talking about saving after doing edit to pictures, or about exporting pictures or ???

I cannot reproduce this problem for neither "save" nor "export"... how did you notice the problem? 

For easy troubleshooting, this custom Picasa button might help you out:

PS: could you please check if you are using the really latest version of Picasa. In "Help"/"About picasa..." the version should be 3.9.0 built 136.20. If it isn't, please update Picasa from picasa.google.com.

Hi, I have having the same issue. I am using exiftool to extract the exif information from pictures taken by a Reconyx trail camera. When I save after adding tags in Picasa I am losing exif information. I am using version 3.9.137 build 118. 

Lindsey,

>> It is a known problem that some more exotic info that is embedded in a non-standard way by some camara's is sometimes lost... <<

To confirm, I just edited almost 500 photos from a working trip to Israel, primarily adding captions to the images (today!)!!!!

PICASA COMPLETELY STRIPPED _ALL_ OF THE EXIF DATA INCLUDING THE GPS LOCATION AND DIRECTION COORDINATES _INCLUDING_ THE ORIGINAL IMAGE DATE AND TIME INFORMATION.

Version 3.9.137 reported as "current"

Here's an example of the _ONLY_ EXIF data remaining after simply adding a caption.
==============================

>> exotic <<

Most of the 500 images were taken with a google Nexus 4... one would expect that even if the EXIF data was stored in a "non-standard" format, that the picasa programmers would at least take google products into consideration.

Beverly Howard

"I can assure everyone that if you add a caption using Picasa TODAY, you _will loose_ potentially critical EXIF data."
Well, I can assure everyone that it does not happen here, and never happened before.
I understand your frustration but cannot imagine that this happens by adding captions in Picasa. Something else could be goin on, but no idea what ...
Anything else you did to these photos ?
Can you reproduce the error on say a new pic from the camera you simply copied to the computer ?
I hope you have good backups.

Hi,

I could not find the photos.
You can download every version here: http://www.filehippo.com/download_picasa
See https://sites.google.com/site/picasaresources/Home/Picasa-FAQ/picasa/how-to/how-to-install-a-previous-version-of-picasa
But 3.8 was very different from 3.9 : many data are stored differently. I would not do it.
Most users do not seem to have this problem with the actual version.

>> Well, I can assure everyone that it does not happen here, and never happened before. <<

That's hard to understand since there are a number of posts on this and other forums dating back years that report the same issue.

>> I understand your frustration but cannot imagine that this happens by adding captions in Picasa. <<
>>  Something else could be goin on, but no idea what ...Anything else you did to these photos ? <<

This is not imagination, but now documented fact as I carefully reviewed each step in the process.

The pictures were uploaded to the computer, picasa was opened, picasa scanned the new images and we viewed them.

Of the almost 500 images _Picasa_ showed location markers on around two thirds of the thumbnails which is normal since the phone (a Nexus 4) may not have established a GPS location when the image is snapped. 

Before the captions were added, we reviewed a number (probably about 20%) of the images with location markers and went to the google maps locations of those image using picasa to link to google maps.

NO other process or software touched the photos between the time we reviewed the locations and the original location and other EXIF data was deleted.

Note that I posted the complete EXIF data set of one of the captioned images in my above post.

Those few remaining EXIF  lines which show "Picasa" and the date/time of the _picasa_ edits are the damming evidence that they were generated _by picasa_  leaving _none_ of the original EXIF camera data in the edited image.

As for the process, captions were added to _all_ photographs.  Two photographs of the 500 were reoriented.  No other edits were made.

>> Can you reproduce the error on say a new pic from the camera you simply copied to the computer ? <<

No, I'm not going to do that.  The information in my posts carefully explains all of the evidence that I have collected.  It's now up to the google team to either use or discard my research and frustration to figure out what is going on inside the software.

I will collect several "before and after" images and post them for investigation, but it will probably be later this weekend before I can do that.

I _will_ note that since my original post, I have found a handful of of images where the captions were added by picasa retained the original EXIF data, but most were scrubbed.

Since this evidence is so clear, we will do no more edits or captioning using picasa but go back to other software to prevent another disaster such as this one and only use picasa to create and upload albums.

>> I hope you have good backups. <<

Backups we have... but what we do not have, and will never recover, is the time that was expended to sit down and create almost 500 captions.  I have yet to find any process that would allow syncing the caption fields back to (copies of) the original images.

Thanks for your response.  Please remember that it is extremely easy to assume that the problem is on the user end when you have not experienced it in your own use of the product.  Unfortunately, that assumption goes a long way to assuring that serious problems in software will take a long time, if ever, to get resolved.

Respectfully, but sincerely,
Beverly Howard

Have just changed to a new computer with Win8.1 I now find that all the EXIF info has disappeared. I transferred the original photo files from my previous XP machine!