Being a happy owner of a Mac I decided to give iPhoto a try to manage my photos. To give a bit of a background, we have an external Gallery2 to which we export selected photos (but locally we store more photos). I also occasionally edit my photos in GIMP (each time happy that there’s such a powerful application and at the same time swearing at the user interface) and also use Panorama Tools to stitch panoramas I took. Finally, I use my own tool for geotagging of my photos if I had taken a GPS with me on my trip. Now here’s how I manage to do all this.
Rolls vs Albums
Whenever you import photos iPhoto creates a Roll for you, whether you like it or not. The idea is that iPhoto rolls correspond to film rolls, sadly, with all disadvantages of the latter. Living in 21st century, I found it immensely annoying that my hiking photos are intermixed with my balcony photos just because I forgot to download them before going for a hike. Conversely, whenever I import a stitched panorama it always appears as a “Roll XX”, even if I’d want it to be a part of my hiking roll.
Fortunately, there’s a way to manage this. Unfortunately, it’s not very intuitive:
- Merging rolls: you can drag photos (or an entire roll) from a roll to another roll. Note that it’s not sufficient to drag it to where the photos are, you need to drag it exactly to the roll bar. Because of this, I fold the foll I want to copy to before doing it. Once the source roll is empty, it magically vanishes.
- Creating a new roll: if you select some photos you can create a roll with File>Create Film Roll.
Under the hood: each roll corresponds to a directory on the harddisk with the roll’s name. For example, my roll called Pfaff hike would be under
~/Pictures/iPhoto Library/Originals/2007/Pfaff Hike. Modified photos will be under ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library/Originals/2007/Pfaff Hike.
Finally, deleting photos from rolls deletes them, deleting them from album does not.
Lossy re-compression and image rotation
I noticed that whenever I import photos, iPhoto rotates them and saves them in the Modifed directory. There are two problems with it:
- duplicate disk space: iPhoto keeps both the rotated and unrotated version.
- lossy transform: to my horror I realized that iPhoto performs a lossy rotation operation as the photos shirnk significantly (this is really shamefull as lossless 90deg rotation is not something very difficult).
The solution is to transform the photos on the CF card. It’s a bit of a nuissance as the images will be read and written to the CF card, but let be it. Initially, I thought of exittran as I used in on Linux, but I have not found it in Darwin ports. Instead, I learned that jtran will also do the job and can be installed with port install jhead (credits to donc).
Finally, here’s a magic command that rotates all photos on my CF card:
find /Volumes/EOS_DIGITAL -name '*.JPG' -exec jhead -autorot {} \;
It is important that it’s executed after the card is inserted but before the photos are imported to iPhoto.
Second, I try to avoid any editing operations in iPhoto and set an external editor to GIMP. Now if I need to change something, I double-click on the photo and I edit it in GIMP. Also in GIMP the default quality is 85 so I have to use Save As… to set higher quality. I typically use 95-97 or so 
Tadek’s workflow:
To summarize, here’s what I do with my photos on import:
- Get myself a cup of tea.
- Insert CF card, wait until “Import photos dialog pops up”.
- Open shell and run the magic command:
find /Volumes/EOS_DIGITAL -name '*.JPG' -exec jhead -autorot {} \;
- Run my geotagging script of on
/Volumes/EOS_DIGITAL
- Once the rotation has finished, import the photos.
- Split the photos into thematic rolls.
- Select photos for panoramas (use “Show File” to find the file to be imported in PTGui).
- Stitch panoramas.
- Import panoramas back to iPhoto (will show as new rolls).
- Merge panormas rolls.
- Go quickly through my rolls, deleting the photos I definitely don’t want.
- Edit some photos in GIMP.
- Create an album with all the photos from my roll.
- Select the best photos by reordering / deleting them.
- Import photos to my Gallery using the great iPhotoToGallery plugin.
- Change album sorting to “manual”.
As simple as one button press, huh?
