Logging in into Picasa 3.9 under Linux

A few years ago I showed my father Picasa under Linux, he liked it and started to use it to upload his photos, and has been using it for almost 6 years, even Google discontinued Picasa for Linux at version 3.0 (Picasa is at 3.9 now).

Unfortunately a few weeks ago seems Google decided to kill support for old APIs in the server side and Picasa 3.0 for Linux was giving back an error when trying to upload an image ("Could not find POST url" or similar). I suggested to wait to see if they would come back, but it seems they haven't and so i've had to fix it for him.

Since he's heavily invested in Picasa I've had to install Picasa for windows under wine to make it work. It has not been trivial to get to work so I'll share it here for others that committed the error of trusting privative software and services.

The story is this: Installing picasa 3.9 for windows under wine is pretty easy (next, next, next). The problem is once you are running it, being able to log in. First problem is that the webview using for login doesn't even show. Most of the interwebs suggest installing ie8 using winetricks to solve that and it indeed solves the problem of the webview not showing, but still i can't log in (interestingly the webview will tell you if you wrote the password wrong).

At this point i was stuck for a few hours, even found some dude that claimed he had installed Google Chrome Frame for Internet Explorer and that had fixed for him. But not for me.

After a few hours, I stopped trusting the internet and started to think. I have a windows installation laying around, and i can log in from there, and once logged in Picasa does not ask for the password again, so it must be storing something no?

So I made a copy of the Program Files folder and compared it after loggin in, folders where exactly the same. So it was not stored there, which makes sense since log in is per user not per machine. Next i tried in that weird Personal Folder (Windows $HOME) but could not find any change either. Last chance was the registry, i used http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/reg_file_from_application.html and saw that when logging in, Picasa writes a few entries in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Picasa\Picasa2\Preferences namely GoogleOAuth, GoogleOAuthEmail, GoogleOAuthServices and GoogleOAuthVersion, so I copied these over to the wine installation (with "wine regedit") and now my father can run Picasa just fine again.

Lessons learned:
* Non Free Software will eventually come back and hit you, if possible don't use it for stuff that is critical to you
* Think about your problem, sometimes is easier than just googling random instructions from the internet.