Photo management on a Mac (for a PC user)

Hi all

I've been browsing this forum for a few weeks now, in anticipation of the switch to an iMac (I plan to buy a 24" one soon as a replacement for an ageing Mesh PC).

I want to use the iMac primarily for photography (probably Elements 6) and home video editting, plus iTunes for my iPod Touch. Photography is the KEY use though.

I am a bit confused about iPhoto and don't want to screw up my libraries when I switch over. I have all my pics organised logically into subkect folders on my PC, and want to retain this structure.

Any advice based on experience about how to manage the switch successfully? I want to avoid problems with libraries / duplicates etc that I have got the impression can happen with iPhoto 08 if you get it wrong!

My workflow will basically be - pull the photos to the hard drive, immediately back up the uneditted photos to an external disk, edit, rename the pics on the iMac (in Elements).

Many thanks for your help! Looking forward to the switch - but don'w want any pain!

Marcus
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http://www.mbphotography.net

Really can no-one offer advice on this?
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http://www.mbphotography.net

You wrote your original question all of 3.5 hours ago and now you're complaining that 'it's not very helpful'! it's now 8AM on the US eastern coast.

Have you considered, oh, maybe people are, um, sleeping or getting their kids off to school or going to work and not all wasting time surfing some internet photo forum?

Or maybe it's not quite the 24/7 help desk you think it is staffed with an army of people just sitting and waiting to answer your every inquiry?

You have quite the sense of entitlement.

For your information there is a world outside the US (Europe for example - heard of it?).

I was comparing the activity with that of, for example, the Canon forums where replies to sensible questions are much more forthcoming.

This forum isn't as active as some others, and even on those others, it might take a 'bump' to get some recognition. Such as you just did (but you didn't have to take the offended-for-being-ignored posture, which comes off as arrogant and petulant). Don't take it personally, it's just how the dynamic on the boards can play out. Remember, no one hereabouts has any obligation to respond, so any help obtained is essentially good will.

I believe iPhoto can reference your images in your current directory structure, but I never really gave iPhoto much of a chance. You could look into this further yourself (download the application help file, or get info in About.com's iPhoto help section, for example), until someone else with iPhoto experience passes through.

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...Bob, NYC

Galleries: http://www.pbase.com/btullis

I went through a similar change, but after seeing your attitude about nobody answering in 3.5 hrs, I won't even waste anymore time.

When I post questions I wait for multiple responses over the next day or so to get different opinions. People have other lives and as someone said this isn't a heavily trafficed forum. I spend more time in camera ones.

Hello, Marcus. Yes, there is a world outside the US, but unfortunately Macs are far more popular so far in the US than in they are in Europe, so a disproportionately large number of the regular posters here are from the US. I'm afraid you'll just have to deal with that when posting in this forum.

Thanks all for the replies

Marcus

Anyway, you can keep your folder structure when using the latest iphoto, but it's probably not going to be exactly what you want. I myself just use metadata keywords and Bridge with my own folder structure, but there are several other options you might investigate.

I think, given your preferences, that iPhoto would just complicate and confuse the mix. You seem to be happy with a folder hierarchy that you built yourself and maintain yourself, without benefit of a database, so I would just bring the folder hierarchy over intact, and then use Bridge in Elements to do any importing an renaming as you add to your folder stacks, and use Elements to adjust your images.

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Only my opinion. It's worth what you paid for it. Your mileage may vary! ;-}
http://www.dougwigton.com/

Marcus,

As it's been pointed out, this board does not move as fast as others, and certainly not as fast as the Canon boards do (I believe they are the most trafficked areas of dpreview). That's both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that it takes hours for a post to drift to the second page and therefore you have a good chance that the most respected members of this forum will get a chance to see your query. You already got a few of them to respond (Conchita, Bob Tullis and Alpha Doug), another is SUBY, who I believe is in Australia.

Regarding your original query, I would say that you can continue to use your layout with iPhoto (it can reference files rather than manage them). You can import images into iPhoto after you have imported them to the HD. But if you are really tied to that system, you might be happier to continue with it and avoid iPhoto all together. Use PSE with Bridge or Lightroom. iPhoto and Aperture offer different ways of managing your images and the workflow. You might want to read up on them first and decide if you want to use this opportunity to overall your process. I use to have a complete folder system. I continued with it when I moved to the Mac, but at some point I decided to start using the image management system of iPhoto, rather than a file management system like Folder or Windows Explorer.

Cheers and good luck with your decision making process.

Michel

Of course, the next step above this is to move your entire workflow to Aperture or Lightroom, only using Elements for targeted editing.

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Only my opinion. It's worth what you paid for it. Your mileage may vary! ;-}
http://www.dougwigton.com/

The point about applications like iPhoto is to embrace its way of managing your photos. iPhoto's library will store your photos by date, but if you tag your photos with metadata and use smart albums, how iPhoto organizes your photos is really irrelevant.

If you organize by subject matter, for example, you might have instances where a picture is about multiple subjects (e.g., kids and kids birthdays and outdoor party, etc). With a rigid folder structure, you'll have to make some compromises since you probably will not want to duplicate pictures to satisfy multiple subjects. If you use metadata and smart folders, then you will not experience the problem I described. Plus, it makes it much easier to find your photos.

For this to work, though, you have to be serious about tagging your photos. If you have thousands of untagged photos, the task is pretty daunting.

Thanks again - particularly for these recent replies.

I think I have got some thinking to do about my workflow. There seem to be pros and cons of a fodler structure versus using a database. I guess the fundamental problem I have is that taking a database approach now means re-tagging 20,000 odd photos from the past (which I'd never have the time to do).

Sorry for another question - but I have always managed by workflow very clumsily and wnat to understand what others do differently.

I always import the pics from the card, back these originals up to an external drive as digital negatives. The copies on my hard disk, I edit save and rename to something useful and meaningful then delete the IMG_XXX.jpg or RAW. If I import (into iPhoto, Bridge, Lightroom or whatever) does this give me a problem because I am deleting the original file I delete?

Does this make sense - not sure how to explain it differently!?

Thanks again

Marcus
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http://www.mbphotography.net

You can import folders into iPhoto. Just choose a folder and drag it onto the iPhoto icon and the folder's contents are imported.

iPhoto will deem it an "event," and will give this event the name of the folder (which of course you can change).

I've used iPhoto for years and pretty much like it. Whenever I've tried demo versions of Aperture or Lightroom, I'm a bit bewildered and go back to iPhoto. (But then again, I probably don't give them much of a chance.)

If you get a .Mac account, you can publish galleries. Also, iPhoto comes as part of iLife, which includes (among other things) iWeb, a quick and easy way to make and publish web pages.

Hope this helps.
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Bob Yanal
http://www.flickr.com/photos/16445975@N05/
http://gallery.mac.com/ryanal#gallery

A P.S. to my previous post. iPhoto will not read Photoshop files whose layers are not merged or "flattened."

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Bob Yanal
http://www.flickr.com/photos/16445975@N05/
http://gallery.mac.com/ryanal#gallery

What I would do is to copy all your folders into a Picture folder of your iMac, then in iPhoto go to Preferences, Advanced and make sure you "unclick" Copy items to iPhoto library. The you can import all your photo into iPhoto without disturbing your original folders. If you import folder by folder you could then combine each folder into an Event (with the name of your original Folder) with one picture upfront, the rest stacked behind it. Then you can also rate your pictures, create albums, slide shows, etc. without affecting your original folder structure.

I file my pictures in Monthly folders (e.g. March 08) and special events (e.g. Christmas 08) and found this system to be quite acceptable for my needs. By the way, in Lightroom you can also import pictures for editing from their folders without actually creating another folder in Lightroom. You just have to export edited jpg pictures back to your original folder where they will be stored with you RAW files.

You're right, you do have some thinking to do, especially with 20k+ photos. As others have stated before, iPhoto can reference your photos, so it's a bit less traumatic.

As for workflow, here's what I do on Aperture:

1. Insert CF card. I set up common metadata keywords, places, etc, to be applied when import starts. I also set up the time interval for stacks (e.g., group photos taken within 2sec of each other).

2. Click Import. Aperture imports images as "referenced masters." What this means is that instead of copying the RAW files into its library, it organizes them in a way I specify (folders by year/month/date, stored on an external HD). Aperture also renames the masters in a format I specify (e.g., DSC5667 2008-03-28 at 23-45-12.NEF, a timestamp). By using referenced masters, it's easier to back up the "negatives." I know exactly when they were taken, and in a pinch, I can see (via Quicklook) what those images are.

3. While Aperture imports, I select "winners," choose the stack picks (so that the picks float to the top when I close the stack), and apply additional metadata tags. This way, I might go from 700 shots (hard to manage) to about 70-100 shots (a little easier to manage). Smart folders help to further separate images by subject matter/person/whatever I like. I use CS3 and TrueGrain for targeted editing/BW conversion.

Using smart folders, I can set up by subject matter across many days or months or years. I can see, for example, my nieces from their baby pics to now--how they're organized underneath is completely irrelevant.

So in summary, you can have Aperture:
1. import to a separate location other than in its own library
2. have it organize your master files
3. have it rename your master files
4. mass-tag your photos in one-go

5. organize your photos however you want, without having to worry about how to do it.

I've never given Lightroom a fair shake, but I assume it can do the above.

Aperture does have a pretty high learning curve. Tutorial videos on apple.com and upcoming books (as mentioned by doug) should make things a little easier to understand.

Hope this helps. Good luck.

Another resource is Apple Discussions for forums for all areas of Mac/Apple including iPhoto: http://discussions.apple.com/index.jspa?categoryID=1
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Vernon

Yes, Old Toad and Terence Devlin over there know an awful lot about iphoto. Good suggestion.