Saturday 10 September 2011

Are you using iPhoto by *its* rules? Make sure your understanding of iPhoto terms is correct.

AAARGH!! Almost buggered up my iPhoto library. Was using "Flagged
photos" to mark favourite photos. Then accidentally selected "Create
Event From Flagged Photos" while trying to split an Event.

Result? An event containing 1000 photos from 2008 to today. And good
thing I Googled it first, because an event is actually like a folder
of photos. So deleting an event would have deleted all the photos in
it. All my favourite photos from my entire library, going back to
2008. Dammit.

But thank <deity> that "Edit -> Undo" can also reverse that operation.

Be careful of "Create Event From Flagged Photos" if you're treating a
"Flagged photo" to indicate a Favourite photo. This is not really what
it's for. Flagging a photo is probably meant for short-term
operations, in the context of creating an event or album going across
multiple windows of photos.

This is where following the rules and reading a bit more would have
helped. The model I *think* I should have been following was:

Event - Physical directory of photos.
Album - Virtual collection of photos.
Album - can have photo from any events
Smart Album - can have photos based on search criteria
Folder - a collection of Albums or Smart Albums

Remember:

Deleting an Event will delete the photos.
Deleting an Album will not delete the photos.

You should only Flag a photo to maintain a temporary list before
either moving them to an Event or Album. Normally I should put them in
an Album, since I like to keep photos grouped by date on the
filesystem. When I was on Windows using Picasa my workflow was to
first rename any new photos in a photo_upload directory using the
program "jhead" then running a Ruby script to move them into
date-based folders using each photo's EXIF metadata.

Don't keep them for longer than that, lest you mistakenly create an
Event and shove photos from different times into the same folder. If
that happens make sure to go to Edit -> Undo before doing anything
else.

This link cleared things up for me:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=iPhoto/8.0/en/6443.html

1 comment:

blythe said...

I did the same thing - I thought I was creating an album of the flagged photos from just that event - instead, over 700 photos were moved from where I had carefully organized them. Only I didn't see right away that that was what had happened. At a later time (too late to do the "oops - undo" thing), I couldn't find my best photos - finally found them lumped in a huge "flagged" folder. Un-flagging them at that point immediately emptied the folder. Now where are they? In an event labeled by the date from 2009-present, buried in the stack of other events. It will take me forever to sort through these and put them back where they belong. Grrrr.