It wasn’t how I intended to spend the last weeks of the year, but sometimes things just happen, don’t they?
Like when the shelves collapsed in my studio earlier in the year, necessitating a wholescale cleanup which resulted in a streamlined workspace for a whole … well, er … 2 weeks at least.
I’d been procrastinating about installing Tiger for months. I knew my HD needed sorting out, but I just didn’t have the time for maintenance work … HaHaHa.
Well, as those of you who had the stamina to read my recent post would know, I had a hard disk crash the Monday before Christmas. The eventual outcome was better than I deserved … all data saved, new 160Gb HD installed, and the old one working again (though relegated to a secondary position where it can do little harm) AND Tiger installed for me.
If that were the sum of it, the neighbours would have heard me singing joyfully, and not just because it’s Christmas. Alas, there was the small matter of getting across all my mail, bookmarks, addresses, music and photos, resetting preferences and what have you – all at a time when I have traditionally done my Christmas shopping.
The mail, bookmarks and addresses were easy … once I condescended to take the occasional glance at Apple Help. The music and photos were more of a problem, and I’m still tangling with it.
The trouble is that, before my HD crashed, it did a great job of mangling/rearranging my music and image files.
iTunes
I began ‘adding to library’ and was moving along merrily until I came upon hundreds of tracks that were now listed as Track 01 etc. (ie without names of the tracks). The album names and artist names had also been lost. So the only way of knowing the identity of these anonymous tracks (I thought) was to play them. Of course, I also had to recreate the album playlists, and send a search through my brain to retrieve the album names. “There must be a better way,” I thought. And there is … just now I discovered the menu command ‘Get CD track names’. Duh … (don’t say it!)
iPhoto
Just possibly, there’s an easy way around my iPhoto problem too. If so, it’s OK for someone to tell me before I find it myself some time next week.
The problem: Partly through the process of adding the images to my Tiger iPhoto library, I realised there was something seriously wrong with the dates. In the HD scramble, many of my thousands of photos were assigned incorrect dates (actually, this had been happening some time before the crash), or put in the wrong folders, e.g. images with the correct date 16/09/05 have found their way into the 3/09/2000 folder. The year 2000 seems to have been a magnet for some spurious reason.
At the moment I’m working through, changing the dates in iPhoto. This could take me the rest of my life, so I hope I find another magic command, equivalent to ‘get CD track names’.
Oh well … at least I’m learning things I didn’t know before.
PS A big thankyou to various MyMac members, and Ian, Beth’s husband, for their invaluable tips along the way.
PPS I wasn’t always this dumb. Back in OS 9 days, I actually knew what I was doing.
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