Mike DelGaudio

I have found that keeping your Picasa photo library on an external drive often presents some challenges. Primarily, Picasa gets confused if the USB drive comes back as a different drive letter than when you mapped it as your library drive.

So, if you have your LIbrary on the USB drive and the drive letter is “E”, it is possible that if you diconnect and reconnect the drive that it might reappear as Drive letter “F”. For me this happens if I attach my camera, then the USB drive, as windows assigns the drive letter as the devices are attached.

Thankfully you can solve this very inexpensively.

First, go get yourself the “USB Drive Letter Manager” also Called “USBDLM”
(This is not freeware, the creator of the software asks for $12 (US) )

Once you have installed it, you can specify that your specific device will always map to the same drive letter, by editing the sample INI file (NB: when you save the INI file remove the word sample from the file name.)

Included in the installation if USBDLM is a little utility that will give you the Device ID and Serial Number of all the attached drives.
From the help file:

First a device ID string has to be identified for the configuration. You get it by attaching the drive in question and run the ListUsbDrives_To_Notepad.cmd tool. ListUsbDrives will show something like this for each USB drive:

MountPoint = U:\
Disk Name = Voyager_2GB
Size = 2.0 GB (NTFS)
Volume Name = \\?\Volume{d9e95680-6d80-11db-afb8-000102b35cc3}\
Drive DevID = USBSTOR\DISK&VEN_CORSAIR&PROD_FLASH_VOYAGER&REV_1.00\..
Ctrl DevID = USB\VID_067B&PID_2517\6&12115AD4&2&1
Ctrl2 DevID = USB\VID_067B&PID_2515\5&1BBE8508&0&1
Volume DevName = \Device\Harddisk4\DP(1)0-0+25
Disk DevName = \Device\000000ae
Device Number = 4
Friendly Name = Corsair Flash Voyager
USB Version = 2.0 (high speed)
USB Serial = —
USB Port Name = 5-1-1

Then you simply create the INI entry:

[DriveLettersDeviceID1]

DeviceID1=USB\VID_067B&PID_2517
Letter1=U

Where the deviceID1 is the Device ID from the List-USB-Drives file and the “U” is whatever drive letter you told Picasa to find your library.

Then go to the services control panel, and start up the USBDLM service. In an instant your drive letter will be remapped. Keep the service set to Automatic so that it will restart whenever you reboot your machine.

Sweet.

Have another way to do it? (A free way maybe?) Let me know in the comments.