There is a very cool feature in iTunes under Preferences: "Keep iTunes Music folder organized". Check it and iTunes does it all for you: For example, change the name of the album and iTunes changes the name of the folder automatically. Great! This makes it really easy to locate the music files on my hard drive. But what about iPhoto? I noticed that when I import pictures, iPhoto creates folders for the year, the month and the day which correspond to the date of the picture which is found to the bottom left of the displayed picture. Well, this sounds pretty good to me. But what if I change the date? I can do that, certainly, no problem. But don't expect iPhoto to move the picture to the corresponding folder. What's going on? Do I have to wait for iLife '05 and pay another $50? Well, I am really happy with the improved performance of iPhoto which was the only reason why I bought iLife '04 but I also expected Apple to have worked on the organizational side. There is no problem with pictures that I take with my digital camera since they have the correct date but what about the old pictures that I scan. I need to change their date from the scan date to the date when they were taken. If I do this in iPhoto, they will stay in the wrong folder. Is there a shareware that does this or a hidden feature in iPhoto that I could turn on? Another thing that bugs me is that in iTunes I can choose the location where my music files are stored but not in iPhoto. I just have to accept the location that Apple decided on. Any suggestions on this?
How to keep iPhoto Library folder organized?
- Thread starter Markim
- Start date
brianleahy
Colonel Panic
It's your Mac, you can certainly do what you like -- but I would urge you, in the most plaintive terms, not to ever venture into the iPhoto Library Folders. The folder structure is very user-UNfriendly, and I am convinced Apple never intended mortal eyes to snoop there.
When I want to get some pictures out of iPhoto, I use iPhoto to export them into another folder somewhere, and then work with the copy.
But that's just me.
When I want to get some pictures out of iPhoto, I use iPhoto to export them into another folder somewhere, and then work with the copy.
But that's just me.
Actually, I want my Mac respectively iPhoto to move the pictures and change the file names for me. I don't want to do it myself. In regard of exporting, you have a point but I am also thinking about backups that I want to do perhaps by the year. If I scan pictures from 1998, I want them to end up in the 1998 folder so that I can back them up on the "1998" DVD. For scanned pictures it may also work if I can set the right date before I import them into iPhoto but how do I do that? I didn't find a date setting in Photoshop Elements.
Gnomo
Registered
The only thing worse than iPhoto library's organization (or lack there of) is the amount of space that it wastes.
1. For every picture that you import it creates a 20k thumbnail image. While I am sure this was created to speed up the application, when you have a photo collection as large as some friends of mine (amature photographers) this amounts to a good deal of space.
2. If you ever use iPhoto to edit a picture (ie. remove red eye), which I highly discourage, iPhoto saves a copy of original import in an originals folder. This also applies to images you have already edited (at least in iPhoto 2, haven't tried this in iPhoto '04) with iPhoto, if you closed the program between edits.
3. Every album you create adds another folder to your disk. Every image you put in an album creates a symbolic link (aka Alias) to the original. While this doesn't really eat all that much space, I just don't understand why they didn't use a plist for this, it would have been simpler and saved much more space.
4. The mysterious Data folders. Every image you create has a corresponding 2 files in the Data folder in the folder you images are in. Looking at these in a text editor, the look like plist files, only not in xml. Why these weren't just consolidated into a single data.plist file, we may never know.
1. For every picture that you import it creates a 20k thumbnail image. While I am sure this was created to speed up the application, when you have a photo collection as large as some friends of mine (amature photographers) this amounts to a good deal of space.
2. If you ever use iPhoto to edit a picture (ie. remove red eye), which I highly discourage, iPhoto saves a copy of original import in an originals folder. This also applies to images you have already edited (at least in iPhoto 2, haven't tried this in iPhoto '04) with iPhoto, if you closed the program between edits.
3. Every album you create adds another folder to your disk. Every image you put in an album creates a symbolic link (aka Alias) to the original. While this doesn't really eat all that much space, I just don't understand why they didn't use a plist for this, it would have been simpler and saved much more space.
4. The mysterious Data folders. Every image you create has a corresponding 2 files in the Data folder in the folder you images are in. Looking at these in a text editor, the look like plist files, only not in xml. Why these weren't just consolidated into a single data.plist file, we may never know.