Why is Picasa changing desktop icons?

Q I recently installed Google’s Picasa photo application. However, I realised that it had changed most of the icons on my Windows Desktop to the Picasa icon. As a result, I couldn’t open anything – even Picasa. I uninstalled the program and everything returned to normal.

Then I tried re-installing it and the same issue occurred. I like Picasa but do not understand why it is changing all the icons like this. Can you help?

Paul Raftery

A A trawl through Google’s support forums suggest a few people have experienced a similar or the same issue. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, there is no clear solution to this particular problem – it appears to be a bug, in other words. However, there are a couple of workarounds that seem to do the job.

What’s happening here is that the Picasa Photo Viewer utility is associating itself with various file types that it is unable to open, such as PDF files. So, one option is to manually remake all the file associations so that Windows knows to open them with the correct applications.

To do this, right-click any one of the affected files and select Properties from the pop-up menu. Now click the Change button and use the Open With dialogue box to select the correct application. If the relevant program isn’t listed, click the Browse button and use Windows Explorer to navigate to the correct program file. Click OK when you are done.

However, depending on how many file types have been wrongly associated with Picasa Photo Viewer, this could be an arduous task. The other stopgap option, then, is to uninstall Picasa Photo Viewer (or, if starting over, don’t install it in the first place). It is in fact a separate program from Picasa itself, so it can be safely removed without affecting your enjoyment of Picasa.

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