Setting Picasa Photo Viewer as the Default Image viewer in Linux Mint (12)

There are some things in life, you can't just compromise upon. Image viewer is one of them and Picasa Photo Viewer happens to be my favorite amongst all that I have used till date. So, when I moved to Linux Mint (Lisa), I was itching to use the same on Linux too. As it turned out, some gentleman (caiacoa) had designed a wrapper (it actually still runs through wine) for Picasa Photo Viewer and to open a particular image, one had to just type

/usr/bin/PicasaPhotoViewer <Image-File-Name>

However, it is rather cumbersome to go to the terminal every time to open a image(!), and if you wanted to set the default image viewer through 'right-click->Properties', Picasa Photo Viewer just won't show up in the list. In Ubuntu, we do have a field (a text box) to specify the path of the app to open a particular file; but in Linux Mint, they don't have even that.

The solution that I found out, is as follows:

The problem basically was to get 'PicasaPhotoViewer' listed in the list of applications, when one does a right click->Properties->Open With. And this link got me going (see last point: TroubleShooting).

This was just a minor variation of what is mentioned in the link above. Instead of PicasaPhotoViewer.desktop being located at /usr/share/applications, it was located at /usr/local/share/applications/PicasaPhotoViewer.desktop. As also mentioned on the linked page, adding a %U to the Exec line did the trick.

ie.

< Exec=PicasaPhotoViewer # Goes out

> Exec=PicasaPhotoViewer %U # Comes in

Picasa Photo Viewer would now show up as an app to open images, and rest is easy.

P.S: Btw, I also found a small bug in /usr/bin/PicasaPhotoViewer script. Would post on it, once it is confirmed by the developer Irakli Gozalishvili.