Grrrr (iPhoto edition)

[hrj]

I have done something annoyingly strange, but not irretrievable, in iPhoto. (Not irretrievable thanks to my Time Machine backups.) It may take some time, however, to figure out how to undo it. What I wanted to do was to move all the underlying image files out of the iPhoto library to make it easier to edit them with whatever program I want. Also to make it easier to manage them according to my own filing systems. And I'd just read an article in Macworld about how to change the settings so that iPhoto itself will work through an external image file rather than insisting on importing everything into iPhoto's own file management system (whatever that may be).

Ok, so I followed the directions. I think. But I also needed to extract the underlying image files themselves. And I thought I'd done that. Except that after I went back and started doing things with the images, after setting up the new iPhoto external reference library, I discovered that all my images were mere thumbnails. Not full size.

Hmm, I thought. Maybe I accidentally copied over the automatically generated iPhoto thumbnails instead of the actual image files. Except that at the same time, I'd moved a couple of other folders of photos -- ones that had never been inside iPhoto previously -- to my new "photo reference folder", and then "imported" them to iPhoto with the new settings which should have simply set up pointer-references to them via the iPhoto library (and not changed the original image files at all). And all those photo files were now thumbnail sized as well.

So I have two mysteries. Given that I evidently failed to do so, how do I locate and extract the original underlying image files for all the photos I've been stashing in iPhoto all this time? And what the heck did iPhoto do with all those newly moved photos that have now been converted into thumbnails? In the case of the latter set, I know exactly where to find the original files in my backups. But in the case of the former, I need to know where I'm looking before I can extract them and restore the full-sized images. This may take some serious research.

ETA: On further examination, based on the size of the original (theoretically empty) iPhoto library file, I think all the photo data must still be in there somewhere. And this is exactly the whole reason I wanted to mess around with it in the first place: I dislike the "black box" approach that iPhoto takes to file management.

Comments

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Sympathies re the disappearance of the photos. If iPhoto works anything like the PhotoShop Elements photo managing sofware, it does indeed leave the picture files exactly where they are and therefore must just save some sort of link to them.

Do you know where your camera downloads pictures to?

To be honest, I refuse to use any of these photo library managing things and I have my own manual filing system which works fine for me.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Back before I had a digital camera, I built my own filing and tracking system for images (mostly to keep track of multiple versions of the same original image with various edits applied). But when I got a camera and a phone-camera, I figured I'd try working with iPhoto for the ease of interface. Unfortunately, it triggers my Control Issues in a major way. What I really want is not so much a file management system, but an image indexing system that will help me track the relationships between versions and will let me tag sets of images for particular projects without having to make (and move) separate copies for each project. That part isn't so much for photos as for scanned images for research purposes.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I must admit that tagging is a useful feature of photo-managing software. So far I've managed without it, but I can see how it would be invaluable for any sort of project that uses images.

[goldenstag.livejournal.com]

I dislike the "black box" approach that iPhoto takes to file management.

But you're not the "average" computer user ... heh. Neither am I. I don't tend to use any of the "automatic" stuff for file management, because it makes me crazy. In Windows computers it is the "My Documents" and "My this" and "My that" folders ... argh! STOP IT! Oh well.

[cryptocosm.livejournal.com]

Sounds like yet another instance of the "I know what you want better than you do" programming paradigm. Unfortunately, for the vast majority of the computer-using public, that paradigm is probably accurate.