[nikon90s]

I am looking for a was to organize files when I upload them from my camera. right now iphoto just numbers them and it seems like every time I turn the camera off when I am out shooting those photos go into a new numbered file so you can imagine that I have a ton of files all numbered and I can't find anything very ease. I have to go into file after file, now this is my first mac so I am still learning how it all works but I don't find it very user friendly at all. On my last computer when ever I imported photos I could pick a file to put them in or open a new file anywhere in my Hard drive. So if I was taking shots of my son I could put all the shots in a file already on my computer called John or if I wanted to I could open that file up and make a new file in john. Now that I am learning to use a mac I find the lace of control (from what I know at this point) to suck . I really want to find a better way then dragging each photo into a file on iphoto one at a time.
Any help would be GREAT!!!

Thanks

[TETENAL]

I think you mean folder, not file. The idea of iPhoto is that you organize your photos completely from withing iPhoto, so how the folders are named in which iPhoto saves your photos is irrelevant. You shouldn't look at it in the Finder.

After you imported photos from you camera, you can add commentaries to your photos that describe them. One commentary might be "My son John playing at the beach in Hawaii in our holidays". Then you can search your fotos for John (or Hawaii or holidays etc.) and iPhoto will find all the relevant photos. You can also create keywords in iPhoto and assign them to the photos. You could use the "family" keyword or even create a special keyword for your son and let iPhoto only display photos which have a certain keyword assigned.

[JKT]

FWIW, the folder structure of iPhoto is organsised on the basis of the date of the photos or images:

e.g. iPhoto Library>2005>07>07>

means that the photos in that folder were taken on the 7th July 2005 (as determined from their EXIF metadata).

However, as TETENAL says, you should use iPhoto application itself to organise your images. You need to read up on the use of Keywords and Smart Albums in the iPhoto Help to learn how to make organising your images a doddle.

If you still don't like iPhoto, you can switch to using Image Capture instead which will allow you to do things the way you are used to. If you launch Image Capture, you can change it to become the default app for when you attach your camera under its Preferences settings.

[Grimesy]

I wrote up how I like to use iPhoto to organize my photos. Check it out here:

http://www.johndcurtis.com/blog/blog...th-iPhoto.html

[OmniX]

Originally Posted by TETENAL

After you imported photos from you camera, you can add commentaries to your photos that describe them. One commentary might be "My son John playing at the beach in Hawaii in our holidays". Then you can search your fotos for John (or Hawaii or holidays etc.) and iPhoto will find all the relevant photos. You can also create keywords in iPhoto and assign them to the photos. You could use the "family" keyword or even create a special keyword for your son and let iPhoto only display photos which have a certain keyword assigned.

Question: for every photo that you tag or comment, where does iPhoto store this metadata? Is it stored somewhere in the photo file itself, or is it stored outside the file, e.g. in some iPhoto database? If the latter, that would be a bit disappointing as it would mean you would be locked in to iPhoto and could never switch to another product (w/o loosing all your metadata) or system should the need or desire arise (e.g. one might want to use photos and their metadata in another photo-organizing app on another computer or platform (e.g. Picasa on Windows/Linux), or transfer photos to the web-based photo organizing/sharing system which are already somewhat impressive, and constantly improving and evolving (Flickr, etc.).

but to reiterate my question: where does iPhoto stick all this metadata?

[SpaceMonkey]

Originally Posted by OmniX

Question: for every photo that you tag or comment, where does iPhoto store this metadata? Is it stored somewhere in the photo file itself, or is it stored outside the file, e.g. in some iPhoto database? If the latter, that would be a bit disappointing as it would mean you would be locked in to iPhoto and could never switch to another product (w/o loosing all your metadata) or system should the need or desire arise (e.g. one might want to use photos and their metadata in another photo-organizing app on another computer or platform (e.g. Picasa on Windows/Linux), or transfer photos to the web-based photo organizing/sharing system which are already somewhat impressive, and constantly improving and evolving (Flickr, etc.).

but to reiterate my question: where does iPhoto stick all this metadata?

It stores it outside the file. Since, AFAIK, there isn't a "standard" for tagging photos (such as ID3 for MP3s), storing the metadata in the files wouldn't guarantee portability anyway. As it stands, people have already been building scripts and things to export data from iTunes/iPhoto libraries. There is even a Flickr exporter, IIRC.

[TETENAL]

Originally Posted by SpaceMonkey

It stores it outside the file. Since, AFAIK, there isn't a "standard" for tagging photos (such as ID3 for MP3s)

There is and it is called EXIF. You can edit it in with Preview for example (Tools→Get Info→Keywords) and it is a portable standard.

[OmniX]

Originally Posted by TETENAL

There is and it is called EXIF. You can edit it in with Preview for example (Tools→Get Info→Keywords) and it is a portable standard.

I'm not familiar with the details of the differences, but there's another standard called IPTC, which Google's Picasa utilizes to store metadata _in_ the file itself. The following is from Google's Picasa info page:


"Write captions that stay with the picture: Picasa makes captions the way journalists do – using the IPTC standard. That means your captions are saved within their pictures and stay with them, whether you export as a web page or make a CD presentation. Picasa captions are fully editable and searchable, and you choose whether to display them or not."

http://picasa.google.com/features/features-edit.html

So it would seem that there are standards available, and Apple just isn't using them; either becuase they're lazy, or they wish to hinder interoperability and lock in their user base. Makes me a bit nervous about investing a lot of time to marking up my photo collection in iPhoto...

[Helmling]

Did anyone else notice that the OP was asking for help a year ago and somebody just revived this thread?

[production_coordinator]

Originally Posted by Helmling

Did anyone else notice that the OP was asking for help a year ago and somebody just revived this thread?

Yep... self promoting his site.

[OmniX]

Originally Posted by production_coordinator

Yep... self promoting his site.

i'm not sure i see anything wrong with that, as long as it's relevant to the discussion at hand, which it is. additionally, the issue of using iPhoto (or other similar software) to organize photo collections efficiently is very much a current issue.

[elpopi]

OmniX,

you are right about Picasa storing caption and keywords in IPTC metadata. Very useful to move your CATALOGGED pics to other organization programs (or to save your catalogging efforts fron a DB crash). The lattest Picasa can even embed geographical location info into the photo with the help of GoogleEarth.

On the Mac platform, Iview MediaPRO can also embed captions, keywords and more to IPTC. It's not free though, but the good news is that it can import iPhoto database. There is a 50% academic discount on it.

[TETENAL]

iView Multimedia is a division of Microsoft.

[elpopi]

That's true, they sold to MS a few days ago although stating that they will continue to support Mac OS; but I can´t think of a better solution right now.

[OmniX]

Originally Posted by elpopi

OmniX,

you are right about Picasa storing caption and keywords in IPTC metadata. Very useful to move your CATALOGGED pics to other organization programs (or to save your catalogging efforts fron a DB crash). The lattest Picasa can even embed geographical location info into the photo with the help of GoogleEarth.

On the Mac platform, Iview MediaPRO can also embed captions, keywords and more to IPTC. It's not free though, but the good news is that it can import iPhoto database. There is a 50% academic discount on it.

thanks elpopi for the recommendation; i may check it out.
but i simply can't believe that there exist no free apps for the OSX platform that can manage and manipulate IPTC metadata for photos. everything would be great if iPhoto would adopt this approach, but based on Apple's attitude towards development of this app, i'm not holding my breath. Any other options?

on a side note, can anyone explain how the Get Info --> 'keywords' function in Preview.app works in relation to IPTC metadata?

[johndcurtis]

Originally Posted by OmniX

i'm not sure i see anything wrong with that, as long as it's relevant to the discussion at hand, which it is. additionally, the issue of using iPhoto (or other similar software) to organize photo collections efficiently is very much a current issue.

oops, I did not see that this thread was a year old! It is in the top5 on google when you search for "Organizing iphoto" and I did not think to check the date -- sorry about that.