If you are something like me, you are easily annoyed by all the Picasa albums that appear in your gallery. Thanks to the synchronization of Google’s account, and the fact that every image you post on Google ends up creating your own album in Picasa, your gallery looks like an endless sequence of albums that contain one or two images each thanks to Picasa.
If all you want when you open the gallery is to see the photos that are actually stored on your device, and the SD card if you use it, follow this step to get rid of all Picasa Web Albums.
For a long time, I used QuickPic to navigate my photos on my phone because of its speed, editing options, and the fact that I didn’t show 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 reason to resort to QuickPic. The only thing that prevents me from using the Gallery daily were the Picasa albums, but no more.
Step 1: Stop synchronizing the Picasa Web album
The first thing you need to do is enter the settings of your device, find the Account section and click on the Google account. Select your email address and uncheck the option “Synchronize Picasa Web Albums “.
Note that the interruption of the synchronization will not affect the instant upload of Google to the photos and will not eliminate the images of Picasa of the cloud. Just stop these sync albums for your device and it will appear in your gallery.
Step 2: Delete the gallery data
Now that Picasa has stopped Syncing 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 delete the data from the gallery.
Go to Settings, Application Manager, and slide your finger up to Tab 3 (All). Scroll down to the gallery and click it. There, you will be able to “Clear Data “.
Step 3: Let the gallery update
At this point, you’re basically done. All you have to do is open the gallery and wait for it to update and rebuild your thumbnails. If you don’t have many photos stored on your device, this will be almost instantaneous, but you will have to wait a few seconds if you have a large collection of photos.
It’s a very easy thing to set up, and the benefits are noticeable, especially if your gallery is full of Picasa albums that make it harder and harder to find the photos that are stored locally on your phone.
And you? Do you prefer to have your Picasa and Sync albums visible inside your gallery, or do you access them from Google and you prefer this method to keep your gallery tidy?
Note (Updated Jun 2019):
If you cannot remove Picasa Photos from Samsung Galaxy S5, Go into app settings and scroll to Picasa force stop and clear data and clear cache and click “turn off”. Done
