I tried to upload my newest pictures to the Google Picasa web albums today, but got an error “Failed to connect to server. Please try again later.” Here are the instructions on how to fix it:
- Find the IP address of the Google Picasa server closest to you. In Windows, click the Start button, click “Run…” and type in cmd. Click “OK”. The command line interface (black window) will launch. Type nslookup , Enter, and then picasaweb.google.com.
You should see something similar to this:
Write down the first IP address for picasaweb that you see. In my case, it is 72.14.255.73.
- Find out which server Picasa is trying to connect to. Launch Picasa, click “Sign in” in the upper right corner. When you are signed in, a “Web Albums” link appears. Click that link. You will be taken to your browser, and it will try to open an URL similar to
http://picasaweb.google.sk/?gl=SK&pli=1&auth=blablablah.
If the top level domain is anything different than “com” (as in my case, it is “sk”), this is the problem. You will need to tell Picasa to connect to the proper server (there are no picasaweb servers under domains other than “com”). Take the next step. - Edit the list of hosts used by TCP/IP. Open C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts, and add the following line at the end:
72.14.255.93 picasaweb.google.sk
*Note: Replace the IP address with the one you have written down in the step 1. Replace to toplevel domain (“sk”) with the one to which your Picasa is trying to connect (see the step 2).
Save the file.
- Restart Picasa. It should now connect successfully.
Closing notes
This is clearly a bug that came about when I was playing with language settings in my Gmail account. Picasa picked up the Slovak language I set, and since then kept trying to connect to the non-existent picasaweb site on the google.sk domain. There
are no settings available in Picasa which would let you to choose the server Picasa is trying to connect to. The instructions posted here are a workaround this bug.
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