If you’re anything like me, you get easily irritated by all the Picasa Albums that appear in your Gallery. Thanks to Google account sync, and to the fact that every image you post to Google+ somehow ends up creating its own album on Picasa, your Gallery looks like a never-ending string of albums that contain one or two images each thanks to Picasa.
If all you’d like when you open the Gallery is to see the photos that are actually stored on your device — and the SD card if you’re using it — then follow this walkthrough to get rid of all the Picasa albums.
For a long time, I’ve used QuickPic to browse my photos on my phone because of its speed, editing options, and the fact that it didn’t show me all my Picasa albums. However, with Android becoming quite fast and efficient now, as well as integrating photo editing by default, I had less and less reasons to resort to QuickPic. The only thing holding me back from using the Gallery daily were the Picasa albums, but no more.
Gallery with locally stored albums but also Picasa albums
Step 1: Stop Picasa Web Album Sync
The first thing you’ll need to do is go into Settings on your device, look for the Accounts section and click on the Google account. Select your email address and deselect the “Sync Picasa Web albums” option.
Disable Picasa web album sync
Keep in mind that stopping the synchronization won’t affect Google+ Instant Upload for photos, and it won’t delete your Picasa images from the cloud. It will just stop these albums from sync’ing to your device and appearing in your Gallery.
Step 2: Clear Gallery Data
Now that Picasa has stopped sync’ing to your phone, new albums should not appear in the Gallery anymore. But the albums that have already been synchronized are already there. That’s why you need to clear the Gallery data.
Go to Settings, Applications Manager and swipe to the 3rd tab (All). Scroll down to Gallery and click it. There, you will be able to “Clear data”.
Click “Clear Data” to force the Gallery to refresh
Step 3: Let the Gallery Refresh
At this point, you’re basically done. All you have to do is open the Gallery and wait for it to refresh and rebuild its thumbnails. If you don’t have a lot of photos stored on your device, this will be almost instantaneous, but you’ll need to wait a few seconds if you have a big collection of photos.
The Gallery is now clean and only shows local photo albums
It’s quite an easy thing to setup, and the benefits are remarkable especially if your Gallery is littered with Picasa albums that make it harder and harder to find the photos that are stored locally on your phone.
What about you? Do your prefer to have your Picasa albums sync’ed and visible inside your Gallery, or do you access them from Google+ and prefer this method of keeping your Gallery tidy?
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