[asxless]

What's best strategy for upgrading 50+ GB of previous iPhoto libraries to iPhoto '08 with minimal hand editing to get back to how they are already organized (i.e.film rolls)? Does anyone know of a way to get iPhoto '08 to honor the existing "film rolls" in an older iPhoto library as "events" during the upgrade process?

Background info:
My wife's PowerMac G4 MDD finally gave up the ghost So we got her a new iMac 24"

The transition from 10.4.11 to 10.5.5 is going pretty smoothly except for iPhoto 08's penchant for chopping up existing iPhoto Libraries into daily or weekly "events". For small iPhoto libraries this is not a big deal. But we take a lot of photos, at least a few each week. We will be converting over a dozen iPhoto libraries covering 7 years (50GB+). And AFAIK the minimum number of "Untitled Events" we will be looking at is 360ish - Yikes! Worse yet, we actually keep a separate backup _ by film roll _ each time we load/erase a camera card. So keeping the iPhoto film roll info is actually handy for us.

Thanks in Advance - asxless in iLand

p.s. The concept of events is nice and we plan to use it extensively in the future. But iPhoto's lack of a option to turn off Auto-Splitting during an iPhoto library "upgrade" and simply use the existing "film rolls" as events, seems pretty draconian. Especially since iPhoto '08 DOES have the option to NOT auto-split newly imported pictures from BOTH a camera/card and the Finder folders. Even an option to auto split by Month would reduce the events by a factor of 4.

[Spheric Harlot]

nm.

[ibook_steve]

From iPhoto 08 help:

When you upgrade to iPhoto ’08, iPhoto converts all your film rolls into Events. At import, photos can be grouped into one Event or several, depending on your preference. If you choose to split the photos in your camera into several Events, iPhoto will create those Events by grouping the photos by the date they were taken.



Where did you see that film rolls did not get converted into events?

Steve

[asxless]

Originally Posted by ibook_steve 

From iPhoto 08 help:

When you upgrade to iPhoto ’08, iPhoto converts all your film rolls into Events. At import, photos can be grouped into one Event or several, depending on your preference. If you choose to split the photos in your camera into several Events, iPhoto will create those Events by grouping the photos by the date they were taken.

Where did you see that film rolls did not get converted into events?....

Thanks for the reply Steve. I did NOT see that film rolls do not get converted into evnts during a library upgrade. In fact that is the option I'm looking for.

The quote from the help is correct BUT potentially misleading. In the testing I've done...

During the library upgrade process iPhoto auto-splits the existing library into events based on the settings in preferences with the longest event being a week. But subsequently when importing photos from a camera/card or Finder folder, I can turn off the auto-splitting entirely.

IOW iPhoto will allow me to organise any future photos by film roll. But it will not allow me to keep already imported photos organized by film rolls

asxless in iLand

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally Posted by asxless 

IOW iPhoto will allow me to organise any future photos by film roll. But it will not allow me to keep already imported photos organized by film rolls

In my (limited, hence my edit above) experience, the exact opposite is true.

[asxless]

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot 

In my (limited, hence my edit above) experience, the exact opposite is true.

When iPhoto presents the "import screen" there is an option to not auto-spit during import. I've tested this and in fact iPhoto will create a single event of all photos imported from a camara/card regardless of the time span. IOW it will allow me to organize future IMPORTED photos by Film Roll. FWIW in the case I tested, the time span was over a year. But the longest event time span I've been able to use during an iPhoto library upgrade is a week.

FWIW IPhoto stores this setting as the AutoSplitGranularity parameter in com.apple.iPhoto.plist in the User/Library/Preferences
0 - Week
1 - Two hours
2 - Eight hours
3 - One day
4 -> same as 0
I didn't try further settings.

asxless in iLand

[Spheric Harlot]

Huh.

This is the first time I've ever heard of iPhoto *retroactively* splitting *existing* film rolls...

[asxless]

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot 

Huh.

This is the first time I've ever heard of iPhoto *retroactively* splitting *existing* film rolls...

AFAIK iPhoto '08 always auto-spits when it "upgrades" an older iPhoto Library (in my case 5.04) to an iPhoto '08
library.

And yes this "retroactive" splitting of older libraries was what I was trying to avoid. FWIW I have now converted the roughly 85 GB of iPhoto 5.04 libraries to iPhoto '08 libraries. It auto-split every single one. Eventually I get around to reorganizing them

asxless in iLand