However, as stated many times by Picasa users and bloggers [1,2,3,4,...], Picasa’s export function misses a tiny little feature that maintains the sort order of the album when exporting it to a folder. Instead of renaming the pictures to keep them sorted in normal file managers (by name), Picasa just copies the files of an album to one folder and thereby destroys the order. As if that wasn’t enough, Picasa also overwrites duplicates filenames from different source folders.

This missing feature has even led to small standalone projects that fix this issue, e.g. Picasa Independent Album Exporter (PIAE) and Picasa Order Preserver. While both applications do their job, both are a bit heavyweight, and PIAE only works for Windows (and not on Wine).

This post presents a tiny little Perl script that renames pictures of an exported album according to their Picasa sort order.

Download & Installation

The script requires Perl module XML::Simple to be installed. In Debian/Ubuntu, install the package libxml-simple-perl.

Download the script, save it to your preferred location and make it executable:

$ sudo apt-get install libxml-simple-perl
$ sudo wget -O /usr/local/bin/picasa-export \
          http://blog.philippheckel.com/uploads/2011/01/picasa-export
$ sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/picasa-export

That’s it for the installation.

Download: Picasa Export 0.1, January 2011

Usage

Using the script is also very simple. Simple export the desired album using Picasa’s “Export to HTML Page” function and call the script with the exported folder as parameter.

Example with “YourAlbum”:

1. Picasa: Click “Folder” → “Export to HTML Page…”. Select “XML Code” in the template list. Click “Export”.
2. Console:

   $ picasa-export ~/"Picasa\ HTML\ Exports/YourAlbum"

After that, the new folder “neworder” contains the renamed pictures.

1^st step: Copy the flash video files (capture the FLV-files)

Ubuntu (and I guess nearly every Linux distribution) makes it really easy to download the flash videos which can be streamed on platforms like Youtube and all the others. Bad luck for Windows users.

• Just open your browser (Opera in my case, Firefox does it too)
• Go to the website with the video you want to stream
• Hit “Play”, wait a few seconds and push “Pause” so that the video starts to buffer
• Now open the /tmp-folder in a file manager like Nautilus or Konquerer
• You will find a file with a name like “Flashzad23″, in any case something starting with “Flash”
• Rename this file to “my-youtube-video.flv”. This also works when the buffering process has not been finished yet

That’s it.

If you just want to watch the video, it’s possible to just open it with your favourite player such as VLC, Totem, MPlayer, etc. This also works while it is still buffering! But since you want to copy it to the iPod Video, you need to resize/re-encode it to a m4v- or mov-file.

2^nd step: Resize/Re-encode the flv-file for the iPod Video

Unfortunately, I didn’t find a perfect and fast solution to re-encode flv-videos for the iPod. I will demonstrate two ways, the fast one for movies and series you only want to watch once. And the perfect one for videos you want to keep on the iPod for a longer time.

Install “ffmpeg” from the Medibuntu repository

For both ways it is at least necessary to install the packages ffmpeg and libavcodec0 from the Medibuntu Repository instead of the regular Ubuntu reps.

You can find out how to do this on the Ubuntu help pages.

The fast way

The fast way a one big disadvantage: The iPod isn’t able to estimate the length of the video. That means it’s not possible to use the nice diamond control to jump within the video. Regular rewind and fast-forward is still possible anyway.

Luckily, you only need one tool: ffmpeg. Just install it via apt-get:

$ apt-get install ffmpeg

Basically, just use this command to convert a flv-file to a mov-file (readable/playable by the iPod Video):

$ ffmpeg -i "my-youtube-video.flv" -f mp4 -vcodec mpeg4 -maxrate 1000k \
   -b 700k -qmin 3 -qmax 5 -bufsize 4096 -g 300 -acodec aac -ab 192k \
   -s 320x240 -aspect 4:3 "my-youtube-video.mov"

To simplify the mass-conversion, I wrote a tiny script which can be copied to your own “.bin”-directory (cp. this article):

#!/bin/bash
 
for file in $@; do
        ffmpeg -i $file -f mp4 -vcodec mpeg4 -maxrate 1000k -b 700k -qmin 3 -qmax 5 \
           -bufsize 4096 -g 300 -acodec aac -ab 192k -s 320x240 -aspect 4:3 $file.mov
done

The perfect (and slow) way

Well, this way might be the better one since the disadvantage from above doesn’t occur. Unfortunately, it does take a lot longer. A LOT! But just try it out by yourself.

I found an flv-to-iPod (m4v) encoding script on ubuntu.com written by John Dong. Find instructions and installation hints to the script on the Ubuntu Wiki

3^rd and last step: Transfer the video to the iPod

Use gtkpod or your favorite iPod managing software to transfer the video to your iPod.
I hope this helped a little. Please let me know if you have difficulties or found a better (easier) way to do the conversion!