Dealing with iPhoto

There it is. That's the automator workflow I've created to deal with my iPhoto "modified photos" problem detailed in my below post on Lifehacker. I can't seem to upload to any storage sites recently, probably a port problem or something, so this screenshot is the best I could do.

What this does, as you might guess, is to copy any photos iPhoto creates in its "Modified" folder to some other folder (which I have set as "Modified from iPhoto"). You have to drag your photos from there and manually put them into your library system, but this program at least puts them all in one place for you. Also, if you have more than one mod of a photo, I think this should automatically add a "2" onto the end of the filename. If not, let me know.

(It's important that, in the options for the first action, you check "Show action when run." Then set the date in that to the day after your "LastRunDate" text file was created, so that you only get photos that were modified after the last time you ran the program.)

Let me know what you think!

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I've been marinating a blog post for around a MONTH about my filing system for photos. I can't get it written because I'm still wrestling with iPhoto. iPhoto has an absolutely stupid way of organizing files. It has two separate folders at the top of its hierarchy: "Modified" and "Original." Under those, it keeps track of all your albums -- but they're often named really random names, like my Christmas album being named "Roll 34," so there's really no way to tell what album a photo is in except from within iPhoto. As such, I import all my photos into my OWN filing system, one where I control the naming of the folders (which take the pattern of yyyy-mm-dd Event Name). I've set iPhoto to create aliases to this system when I import photos, so as to save space.

This system works well for my original files, but whenever you modify something in iPhoto, iPhoto creates a new photo in the "Modified" folder. I wrote a program in Automator that copies all photos that were modified after some certain date (which I set to the last rundate of the program)in any subfolder of the Modified folder to a different folder. I then have to go to that folder and redistribute those copies to my filing system. iPhoto only keeps one copy of each modified photo, so if you got rid of some red-eye and then made it black-and-white, you'd only have the non-redeye b&w file -- which is why it has to be "date modified.". I may end up not using iPhoto at all, and instead just using some image editor for editing and the Spotlight comments field for tagging.

PS: The marathon iPhoto tag session I did for my ~3000 photos would have completely sucked were it not for Keyword Assistant. Also, my file renaming process was made much easier by NameChanger, a versatile app that includes live preview of what your filenames will look like after the rename.