Results tagged “iPhoto” from CLICK

We have a Mac at home, and we have a digital camera, too.

Nothing unusual there, right?

So we use iPhoto, part of the often-free-with-your-Mac iLife suite, to download and manage our digital photos.

OK, Ilene does it. Truth be told, I look to her to help me with most things Mac since the iBook G4 is her main computer, which she uses for everything related to the classes she teaches, from research and preparing PowerPoint presentations to delivering those presentations, creating tests and assignments, logging grades, blogging and way more.

I did rescue the iBook from an ailing hard drive, an operation that took more than a couple hours of sweaty, painstaking work to complete.

Once I set up a backup drive with SuperDuper for this 10.3.9-equipped laptop (which doesn't have and won't be getting OS X 10.5's Time Machine), I figured I was done with Mac crises for the time being.

Then iPhoto "forgot" how to display our many thousand photos.

Upon starting the application, the screen would read "Loading Photos ..." forever. Yet the photos, in their many iPhoto-created folders, were right where they always have been. A check of iPhoto in a smaller account with only a few hundred photos revealed that iPhoto, the application, was working.

It was just the database holding our 3,000+ photos that wasn't working.

I did everything recommended in David Pogue's excellent "iLife '05: The Missing Manual." I threw out Preferences files, ditched database files, relaunched iPhoto a half-dozen times.

Nothing worked.

Finally I resorted to the last remaining tip from "iLife '05: The Missing Manual": The iPhoto Extractor application.

I installed iPhoto Extractor, turned it loose on my "damaged" iPhoto database, extracted the 3,000+ photos, then reimported them into iPhoto.

Sure, any changes we made to individual photos (including rotating them so they were right-side up), any albums we may have created to organize said photos (and yes, we had many) were gone.

But the photos themselves were all there.

I have my idol David Pogue to thank for that (any tech journalist with his own book imprint richly deserves idolatry — and gets it from me, big time).

I also have the people behind iPhoto Extractor to thank for dragging all of those photos out of the many, many folders created by iPhoto in which they're stored and allowing me to see them all, back them up without all that iPhoto baggage and then reimport them into iPhoto, something I did but am not very happy about at all.

I'd be more happy just creating my own system of folders and files which wouldn't be compromised by the application that created them.

For the time being, I'll keep using iPhoto (although I should probably upgrade to a newer version than the Version 4 we have now), but I'll be very, very interested to know what my non-iLife options are for managing and archiving photos in OS X.