iPhoto ’06 commentary by Jeffrey McPheeters

iPhoto ’06 Database Structure

For me the best thing about iLife ’06 is that iPhoto can now reference photos outside of the standard database structure it creates when importing photos. I am no longer forced to import photos into iPhoto’s arcane library structure. Now I can reference all those photos from previous years that I’ve exported onto an archived hard drive. Normally I use iView Media Pro for the archived images (>60,000), and still do for many tasks. But it’s nice to be able to use iPhoto as well. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have the nifty feature of iView that allows it to auto-update a catalog of referenced pics.

My workflow when capturing photos depends on which camera I’m using. The Canon 20D shots are all RAW and go through iView>Capture 1 Pro>Tiff+Jpeg formats. The jpegs are imported into iPhoto and the Tiffs are backed up to DVDs for use when wanting hi-res images to print. At the end of the year, all the photos from that year are archived to an external drive + backup DVDs, and stored in directory structures based on events and topics. Then I delete the exported files and catalogs from the iPhoto Library and start a new year.

With iPhoto ’06 I can re-import the archived images, as references only, by dragging a particular folder of images into the catalog pane and it creates a new catalog named for the folder, and imports reference jpegs for those photos. It can be a photoshop file, TIFF, jpeg, Jp2, etc., even the many 16 bit b&w and 48 bit TIFFs I have archived. It seems to import all the image types I have in my archives. I set the preferences to not import the files into the library, but to simply create the shortcut/alias to them. In so doing, I now have about 200GB worth of photos available to me in my iPhoto Library while only taking up an additional 1GB in reference images within my actual iPhoto Library directory. If the drive(s) are not mounted, those reference photos are still visible in iPhoto and it works fine, however it will alert me that the drive is not mounted if I try to do anything with the actual referenced image. Mounting the drive(s) immediately alerts iPhoto and it goes on its merry way. I can even move the original files around within that given drive, without upsetting iPhoto. It seems to know where I moved the originals and gladly keeps track of them, as long as it is on that drive.

It’s not the perfect solution for me, yet, but I do enjoy having all of my photos available to me in both iPhoto and iView Media Pro because, depending on the project, both are invaluable to me. iView Media Pro is less headache for general management of images files, but it doesn’t have iPhoto’s integration features nor all of the export features and plug-ins available to iPhoto.

Some caveats:

First, importing nested folders simply imports ALL of the images into a single catalog. There’s no way, yet, for iPhoto to create catalogs and sub-catalogs, or create folders with sub-folders. I don’t mind so much, because all of these archived photos are imported to a folder in iPhoto called ‘Archives’ and any referenced image in iPhoto has a contextual menu option to ‘Reveal Original in Finder’ and once there, I can easily find the other TIFF, JPEG, and PSD variations I may have created at one time, or I’ll know immediately which DVD will have the original RAW image stored.

Although iPhoto could be used to keep track of photos stored on disc, for example, and you could mount that disc anytime you wanted, in order to add the photo to a book project or slide show, etc., (you could not edit it, of course, without duplicating it, first), iPhoto doesn’t seem to want to inform the user much about the original source/path other than to say it’s not mounted.

Also, with any referenced images that are duplicated or edited, iPhoto places the copy or edited version within the iPhoto Library folder structure. I think that it is possible to create a rather messy assortment of referenced images, originals, and edited versions in the process of using this method. It doesn’t have the built-in clean-up procedures that other mature cataloging tools such as iView have at their disposal.

Finally, while iPhoto does allow sharing of catalogs, it treats folders of catalogs as one big catalog, so you lose the organization you created when on other systems. Thus, if I have a folder called 2003, within which are 40 catalogs or additional folders with catalogs, totaling some 6,000 photos, the networked viewer simply sees a catalog called 2003 and all 6000 photos are within at the same level. For this reason, I don’t share these referenced catalogs directly, but rather, create new shared catalogs with just the photos that might need to be available to myself from another system on the network.

For me, iPhoto 5 became pretty useful to me, as long as I had a way to work around the primary limitation of keeping all images organized within the iPhoto Library structure itself. It did not allow me to do what iTunes does: the ability to store images outside that structure while still using them as if they were within the structure. But now it does, so iPhoto ’06 is pretty useful to me in many more ways than ever before. I used to export archived photos from iView to re-add them to iPhoto for projects that benefited by iPhoto-integration, then remove them afterward. I don’t think I’ll need to do that any longer, although there may still be some clean-up work to do from time to time. Hopefully someone will write some scripts that will aid in some of the housekeeping chores this workflow method may necessitate.

Jeffrey McPheeters