How To Find Pictures by Date In Picasa

This tutorial shows how to find photos in Picasa by date. This is done by sliding a horizontal scroll bar to filter the photos within a certain date range from current time, which is not very intuitive. The date range you can use can only be from whenever to today, I didn't find a way to specify a date range, as in from 2007 to 2008. But this is already quite useful, as I can find all the starred photos that are less than 5 months old, and export them to a folder and load them all into my digital photo frame.

Find Pictures by Date | Picasa Tutorials

Find Pictures by Date

When you have thousands of photos on your computer, it’s hard to keep track of them even with the best of tools. I’ve had some questions lately from people who have just imported their photos and they seem to have disappeared into computer La-La Land. This happens in Picasa because there are so many options for ways to view your library of photos. For example maybe the particular options you have set is sorting your new folder down toward the bottom and you don’t realize it. When it doesn’t appear at the top, you think they’re lost.

Notice the Recently Updated Album

One simple solution is to take a look at the ‘Recently Updated’ Album. This is an automatic Album that does just that – shows the pictures that were most recently updated. Automatic albums are displayed as a green folder icon with a star. Other automatic albums include ‘Starred Photos’ and ‘Recently Emailed Photos.’ These exists at the top of your albums collection – and they are automatically generated just for your convenience.



Use the Date Range Filter

Another way to find photos by date is to use the Date Range Filter. That’s the slider to the right of the filter section. It usually is placed all the way at the left end which means, “Show me all pictures no matter how old they are.’ As you drag the slider toward the right, you will be filtering your library of photos to newer and newer ones. In the screen shot below, notice the position of the slider and the text that indicates the date range is all pictures up to 10 days old.



The problem with this filter is that you can set a beginning for your date range (e.g. 10 days ago) but the range end is always set to today. I can’t find a way to filter for all pictures taken in September 2007 for example.

You may be saying, “But my folders are already sorted by date.” Well, yes, but that is Folders. What if you have a Folder called Christmas and every year, you put your Christmas day photos in there? That Folder will be sorted according to the date of the Folder which is usually the same as the earliest picture within the folder. (see article: How Folders get Dated)