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.

Grah!

Mail.app just cleared a draft message I had been working on for days! Aah! Not cool!

Quicken Problems

So I'm playing around with new money management software, right, because Quicken 2006 feels like a very Windowsy app. (One high on my list is Cha-Ching, a program currently in beta that was featured on a recent MacBreak short from the MacWorld expo.)

However, I'm having some serious problems exporting my transactions to .QIF from Quicken for importing into other apps. (There's no way I'm going to reenter 7 months of transactions in each program just to try them out.) I can't open the exported files in anything. Preview opens on double-click, but no window shows up. Cha-Ching, bless its little soul, actually tries to do something with the file, but it can't find any transactions. I just got done with a "Live Chat" with one of Quicken's technicians. Here's the transcript. Well dang, I had the transcript on my clipboard but accidentally copied over it. But let me just say that the conversation ended with her saying something along the lines of, "I sympathize with the frustration you must be feeling."

Any tips would be very appreciated. I can provide screenshots if that would help.

A Comment on the Mac Google Experience

{**See the first several comments for info about my edits of this post BEFORE reading**}

Google kicks ass. There's no doubt about it. Gmail's amazing, Picasa's amazing, Google Docs & Spreadsheets are pretty cool too. But as much as Google appeals to the young, techno-hip crowd of today, its programs sometimes don't work well with another big player in that same scene: Apple. As a recent Switcher, I've noticed a few things about the Google experience that aren't quite the same on Macs. There are two basic kinds of deficiencies that I've noticed. [Subsequent investigation (I am without access to my Windows machine at the moment) might reveal more.]

Some of Google's offerings, mainly webapps such as Gmail that can run in any major web browser, simply aren't [isn't] as capable in the Mac OS as they are [it is] on Windows. For example, in Gmail on a Windows machine, when you right-click on something, you get a context menu that is specific to Gmail itself, not the web browser. This provides additional functionality and, in general, a user experience more like that of a desktop app. On a Mac, on the other hand, the context menu in Gmail is the same as the context menu for any other webpage. (This is in Firefox 2.0.)

Other Google products, such as Picasa[, on the other hand,] and Google Earth Plus, are [is] not available at all for the Mac OS. Needless to say, this inhibits the use Mac users can get out of them [it]. I miss Picasa so very dearly from my days on a PC; the little advantages it has over iPhoto make a big difference. And the more I run around my neighborhood, the more I wish I could save paths in Google Earth -- a feature only available to subscribers to Google Earth Plus, a Windows-only application. Of course, I could get Parallels and a licensed copy of Windows, but DAMN that seems expensive.

I expected the Google Mac blog to keep me informed of Google's latest developments for Mac users, but it's actually a sort of personal blog for developers who happen to work in Google's Mac labs. For examples of this, look at the latest two posts: Some guy's hometown and some guy's bassoonery. It's really kind of insulting.

While brainstorming for this post, an idea hit me. Google's assault on Microsoft's user base is one of the greatest trends of recent computing. It seems like a lot of Microsoft's Live services are responses to Google's services (some of which are, admittedly, responses to Yahoo!'s services). Maybe Google has gotten so into this whole competition thing that they're focusing solely on drawing people away from Microsoft -- and Mac users don't need to be drawn! This seems pretty petty to me, though. Maybe it's that Google doesn't want to compete with things already available for the Mac. That would explain the lack of Picasa, as iPhoto's solid, but... No, that's just ridiculous.

In short, Google's an awesome company with some awesome products which are for the most part available on all major platforms, but I wish they'd fix these few shortcomings.