[Mr Mushroom]

I recently had to transfer all of my photos to another computer so I placed the entire iphoto folder on my external HD and figured I would be able to simply drag it back into iphoto on the new computer and it would sort everything into my folders and subfolders.

Not only did it not sort them into my folders/rolls it wasnt even able to import a lot of the photos and just stalled for hours. Am I doing something wrong? Should I import just the jpeg images and not the whole iphoto folder?
Why does iphoto have all these weird numbered folders anyway? It seems as if there is no set pattern to the way it organizes photos. I am starting to hate the program.

Anyone suggest a good alternative?

Thanks in advance

Mushroom

[Mithras]

The "weird numbers" are year/month/date.
To move or change libraries, you simply hold down the option key while launching iPhoto '05, and select the library on the external drive. You don't want to reimport the folder, just adopt it as your new library.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=165518

[Maflynn]

Originally posted by Mr Mushroom:
Anyone suggest a good alternative?

I use iView Pro Geared for the professional or serious photographer. A tad expensive but it run circles around iphoto. I like how you can setup the hierarchy, labels, and keywords. You also have a say of where the photo's should reside.

iLife 05's iPhoto is getting closer to the functionality of IVMP but while its getting closer, iView seems to be better imho.

Mike

[Mr Mushroom]

Thanks for the help guys.

So does that mean that I can keep my iphoto library on my external HD and just point the application to it?

That is what I would ideally like to do as I hate giving up 40Gb of my internal HD for photos.

[Maflynn]

Originally posted by Mr Mushroom:
Thanks for the help guys.

So does that mean that I can keep my iphoto library on my external HD and just point the application to it?

That is what I would ideally like to do as I hate giving up 40Gb of my internal HD for photos.

There may be 3rd party application to facilitate this but to be honest when your using iPhoto you need work within their file structure scheme, so out of the box you cannot do this. iPhoto hides (or handles) the files and you generally need to accept their mechanisms. This was a reason (not the only) why I went over to iView.

Mike

[Mithras]

Yes, you can just move the library to an external drive, and then point iPhoto to it.
As Maflynn notes, if you really dislike the year/month/day organization scheme, then you might look into iView Media, but otherwise I'd give iPhoto another crack.

[legacyb4]

Agreed. It took me a while to get my head around it since I was used to methodically filing and organizing photos according to their physical hierarchy rather than by tags/dates as interpreted by iPhoto.

Luckily, I had been through this once with iTunes as well where I finally gave up trying to organize my physical music library and to manage everything through the iTunes interface.

Once you get over that urge of looking for the photo in the Finder, life becomes a lot simpler...

Originally posted by Mithras:
Yes, you can just move the library to an external drive, and then point iPhoto to it.
As Maflynn notes, if you really dislike the year/month/day organization scheme, then you might look into iView Media, but otherwise I'd give iPhoto another crack.

[eatinwokout]

you can try out shoebox. im thinking of trying it out but haven't heard too much about it.

[mrbass]

iPhoto really chides my hide cuz I can't figure out a way to move years of existing folders already nicely sorted into their respective folders. Thus iPhoto only seems go for importing folders and organizing them...thus starting fresh. I don't want to wade through 8,000 plus photos I've already organized.

edit: forgot to quote this
" If you drag a folder into the main iPhoto viewing area, a "roll" of film will be created with the same name as the folder. If the folder contains sub folders, a roll will be created with the name of each sub folder. While this is going on, the photos are being imported into iPhoto and its folder structure. Your original folder structure and files will remain. You can very easily import your entire former PC structure into iPhoto with just little though and organizing of the folder structure. "

someone posted that somewhere...I'll try it again...but geez what's that like 800 folder's one by one..yikes.

[Fusion]

Can someone please explain to me why iView is so much faster than iPhoto? I agree that iPhoto v.5 is slightly faster than previous versions, but it's still a slug compared to iView. I tried out iView, and loved everything except the interface.

I tend to gravitate towards Apple's software simply because of their reputation, but with iPhoto, I find myself disliking it more and more as I continue to use it.

I just don't understand why iPhoto can't implement the same structure or engine as iView to handle the photos so much better.

P.S. I am just a casual user, most of my photos are 2 to 3 MP in resolution. I would think this would be fairly average.