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Computer pains and consolidating iPhoto libraries
I finally got my computer back. It's been how long? 4 weeks? They replaced the bottom case, the logic board, the LCD panel display and the keyboard, so I virtually have a new computer, but thankfully, I have my old hard drive. I didn't particularly want to go through reinstalling all the applications, the Perl libraries and re-customising everything. However, it's still not working well — I suspect the power manager is being screwy (it keeps forgetting that I have a battery), so I guess I'll be without it again for a while. One of the annoying things I've discovered, in the process of trying to sort out my backups, is that iPhoto hopeless at consolidating libraries. If you are importing a previous iPhoto library, it doesn't recognise the file structure as something that iPhoto itself has previously created, which can lead to hairy problems such as duplicate pictures — it appears to import all .jpg files, including the thumbnails it had created. If you were recovering the old library from backup and your files have a last modified date which is different from the original EXIF date, iPhoto uses the datetime as per the backup, not from the EXIF information contained within the JPEG file. Basically, if you like a tidy file structure with your photos accurately filed away on the date they were taken, you aren't going to get it with a straight import. So I wrote a quick script; if I feed it the root directory of the old iPhoto library, it will delete all the thumbnails, and "touch" my photos files so they have a last modified date which is the same as the original EXIF date and time. After this, it is mostly safe for import, except for one other thing. Every time you rotate a photo in iPhoto, it creates a rotated copy of the photo and moves the original into a subdirectory called "Originals" within the normal dated-space file structure. I don't know about you, but I prefer to keep my originals. I didn't have many rotated photos, so I manually found these and moved the originals back. (On hindsight, I should have just checked if only the relevant EXIF attribute has been changed ... oh well.) If you don't deal with the "Originals" directories — either by deleting them or moving the original files back, iPhoto will also create duplicates. And after all that, I think I'll give up on iPhoto and try something else instead. :) Posted by sniffles at August 16, 2003 11:08 PM