[waffffffle]

I have 3 iPhoto libraries. I used to make a new one every few months because iPhoto would become painfully slow after I hit about 1000 photos. I want to now merge these three libraries. I don't just want to import the photos because I have lots of galleries in each library and I have cropped many of the pictures.

Does anyone know how to do this? Thanks.

[Old Toad]

There is a way but it might be lengthly. Burn your Albums to CD or DVD from within iPhoto. That should give you an iPhoto Library CD that will mount in iPhoto when you insert in the tray.

Then in your main iPhoto Library create new albums which are titled the same as the ones on the CD Library. Then select an album on the CD Library, select all the imates in the album and drag them to the newly created album in your main Library. That should copy your image files to the new album. I believe you should be able to retain the cropping,etc. You can do a test on one album and see how it goes.

Don't know if iPhoto 4 will allow multiple library to be open or consolidation of them.

Hope this has been of some help. Good luck.

[waffffffle]

So if I burn my library in iPhoto it will preserve galleries?

[Old Toad]

Originally posted by waffffffle:
So if I burn my library in iPhoto it will preserve galleries?

Yes, but you will lose the Roll information. If you want to retain Roll information, create an album for each roll, name the album after the roll and then burn.

Always remount the CD and make sure it mounts and is viewable before deleting the images from the iPhoto Library. iPhoto has been known to be a little schizophrenic at times.

[waffffffle]

Ok, sounds good. But I'm not clear how I can recreate the rolls. Will I only have the rolls in the form of albums? Or can I then re-create them as rolls in the future?

[Old Toad]

Originally posted by waffffffle:
Ok, sounds good. But I'm not clear how I can recreate the rolls. Will I only have the rolls in the form of albums? Or can I then re-create them as rolls in the future?

Unfortunately you won't be able to recreate the rolls, but can keep the organization of rolls thru the Albums. At least you'll have albums that represent each roll. That's the best you can hope for without exporting the images for each roll to folders that are titled for each roll and then reimporting them into a new Library.

[bewebste]

Whenever you import a batch of pictures, iPhoto treats that batch as a new roll. So, if you import each album one at a time, you should get one roll for each set of pictures, which you can then rename to the same name the orginal roll in the other library was.

[Boondoggle]

I sure hope someone writes a utility/script to do this automagically.

[gif32]

Originally posted by Boondoggle:
I sure hope someone writes a utility/script to do this automagically.

And this little app (that I would gladly pay a few $$ for) would be great if it tailored to recent switchers like myself. I have thousands of photos that I uploaded to my PC, all sorted in folders that are the equivalent of iPhoto's albums. Why can't I just say "take these 100 folders and import all the photos within them, using the folder names as the album names?"

I was really hoping iLife '04 would solve this

Is there an easy way to do such a "batch import" using currently available tools?

-gif

[starman]

I just had this problem. iPhoto isn't too smart, is it?

Now I have to recreate all these friggin' rolls by hand again.

Mike