to find the appearance of 220 photos that neitehr dh nor I took on my computer really rather freaky.

[hatwoman]

looking at my photos today, using Picassa, I found a folder of 220 photos of former colleagues - all head and shoulders shots, obviously taken for a publication or something. I have absolutely no idea where they came from. I had just made fb friends with a former colleague which is probably just a coincidence, but maybe not. how on earth did they come to be on my computer? does picassa do weird and wonderful things trawling the internet - or, weirder still, other people's hard drives? and why have they appeared suddenly now (I left that job 2 years ago and they weren't there last week)??

Strange, anybody got any answers??

god knows,but how annoying that they weren't of something more exciting than head and shoulders shots of ex-collegues!!

dp who is a computer whizz has no idea.. hes stumped sorry

gerald

Ooo yes, rather freaky.

Sorry don't know the answer.

Have you ever downloaded photos from someone else? I downloaded a few pictures from a friend's camera once, and later discovered that I had accidentally downloaded a whole load that I didn't want. Fortunately nothing incriminating!

Could they have been on a USB drive that you recently plugged in - maybe one that somebody at work had once borrowed to move some files? Picasa will import & index any files it finds on removable media unless you tell it not to.

rusty - something like that does seem like the only feasible explanation - but I've not knowingly plugged in anything work-related for a couple of years. I said they weren't there last week, I guess, in theory they might have been, but I didn't notice them - which would be odd as I was looking in the same place today as I looked at recently. I hate Picassa. I'm sure its main purpose in life is to confuse me. I hate anything that does automatic downloading and filing and organising.

how many of you came on wondering if they were somehow juicy, ready to tell me that dh was lying???

Picasa has a 'facial recognition' feature that goes through all your photos and pulls out the faces of different people and groups them into individual folders. I suspect that all the head and shoulder shots are just ones cropped from other photos on your hard drive.

Either that or you've linked it with your Google account and it's showing you the pictures of all your Gmail contacts.

Picasa does some weird stuff - maybe they were attachments to an email?

oh yes - I reckon MrManager has it in his 00.59 post. I added picassa to the church laptop and it came up with 1000's of photos which I 'd never seen before (I use the laptop regularly) - on closer inspection it turn out it had done the face recognition thing on huge group shots.

This is freaky. What sort of program generates photos automatically (and wastes disk space)?!

Not fit for purpose, IMO.

I bet hit hasn't actualy generated a "photo" - it's just the face finder allowing you to tag people in a photo(s) that is already on the computer.

Mine does the face finder thing.

Does it take up extra storage space? Can it be disabled?

mystery partially solved. I located them on my disk - they were in a folder I had copied over when I left work, with various bits and pieces in it. I have no memory of putting them in the folder when I was still in that job, nor do I understand why I would have done, but I guess I must have. A friend remembers them being taken - for some promotion or other. I don't know why they've lain dormant/ignored by Picassa for 2 years and then suddenly appeared. I guess maybe Picassa is one of those pieces of software that automatically downloads updates - perhaps some update triggered it finding the photos. It looked particularly weird because they'd all been hockneyed - all splashed with flat colour iykwim. suddenly all staring at me

DaftApeth - I don't think it takes up extra space. At least the church laptop only had 4GB of memory left when I put picassa on - and it found 2000+ "pictures" with the face finder......and it didn't throw a wobbly at me

That's a relief, about the storage space. It would be too, too much presumption.