Getting to Your iPhoto Images – Snow Leopard Update

A while ago I wrote about Moving Your Images From iPhoto to Lightroom. A reader, Tom, pointed out a neat feature in Snow Leopard that allows you to directly access the contents of your iPhoto Library.

When importing, the Finder shows a new section on the sidebar called Media. Click that to reveal, among other things, the complete contents of your iPhoto Library.

Simply choose the images you want to import! I still strongly recommend that you opt for COPY and not ADD or MOVE. Choosing ADD will leave the image inside the iPhoto Library and now two different image programs will be making changes to the same file. Probably not a good idea. MOVE will extract the image from the iPhoto Library which could cause you problems the next time you open the library in iPhoto.

Thanks again for the tip Tom!

I believe this is new in Snow Leopard but if any of you recall this feature being available in Leopard or Tiger let me know.

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Tags: snow leopard, Tip, update

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 5:39 am and is filed under Library, Lightroom, Tip, update. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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About the Author: Gene McCullagh
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Gene is an Adobe Community Professional and and Adobe Certified Expert in Photoshop Lightroom, Photoshop, and InDesign, an avid Lightroom fan. He belongs to the Professional Photographers of America (PPA) and the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP). Gene also the Co-Founder, Manager and a frequent blogger for the Dallas Fort Worth Adobe User Group (DFWAUG).

In addition to running Lightroom Secrets, Gene also contributes to O'Reilly's media blog, moderates on the Adobe forums, and helps out on lightroomforums.net.

enzofsilva

Hi. Excellent posts.

My only worry is losing the events organization I have on iPhoto currently. They are a good and easy way to access photos by meaningful events/dates, e.g." Fall 2009"; or "Halloween 2008"; etc.

I have a few questions:

1. Have you heard of PictureSynch and would you use it? Does it import events into LR?

2. Have you ever tried setting LR as an "external editor" via iPhoto preferences and would you reccomend that?

3. Is there anything equivalent to "events" in LR or will I have to create new folder names for every group of pictures I import?

Thanks.

Gene McCullagh

Thanks!

1. I'm not familiar with PictureSynch. It doesn't seem to come up on a search. Do you have a URL for it?

2. LR is not an Editor and so it would not work well as an external editor for iPhoto.

3. Yes! You can use keywords or collections or smart collections or even folder structures. LR is very flexible and can adapt itself to your workflow. It will not, however, read iPhoto event markers so you'll have to decide how you will approach this before you begin importing.

enzofsilva

About PictureSync:

http://en.onsoftware.com/from-iphoto-to-apertur...

http://holocore.com/?PictureSync_Lightroom

http://picturesync.net/

Other way of importing I am not sure really is the best: http://www.digmo.co.uk/tutorials/iphoto-to-ligh...

I tried Aperture and it doesn't seem as good/intuitive as LR: someone did a comparison here - http://www.marco.org/69696574

I am lost because I don't know if once I move to LR I would regret it and miss the iPhoto days... or if Aperture would be better because it does import iPhoto events into "projects" and wouldn't have me worry about naming folders, directories, etc. to store the footage...

An advantage of these is that they don't create an Originals folder containing the RAW files + a Modified folder containing the edited version of pictures, which iPhoto does increasing the amount of space in the hard drive...

Do LR and Aperture offer a chance to "revert to original" at anytime like iPhoto, letting me restore a photo to RAW anytime?

Thanks.

Gene McCullagh

Thanks! Looks like it will just give you another way to work with the keywords and IPTC data. That's fine but LR has a great set of tools already built in for that.

I'd recommend you download the free trial and give LR a test drive for 30 days. iPhoto does have some neat features but overall, if you are serious about your photography, LR wins out no question.

Your RAW files' image data always remain untouched in LR. It is a non-destructive editing system. When you need to go to an external editor like Photoshop LR will return a new file with the destructive edits. But truth be told I now do 90% to 95% of all my edits in LR and never create a second file.

enzofsilva

I tried importing a few photos from iPhoto that I know to have tags (e.g. Christmas08, edited, fall09, etc.) and they were NOT imported into LR (the tags, I mean). Do those tags lie in the IPTC metadata?

How can I important that sort of information into LR with my photos without the need for PictureSync?

P.S. I used the method you explained on this post, going directly to Finder > Media during import...

thanks..

Gene McCullagh

If the files in iPhoto are proprietary RAW formats (such as Canon's CR2 or Nikon's NEF) then the keywords cannot be embedded in the file. LR handles this by creating a sidecar XMP file. I'm not sure how iPhoto does that. But, it would appear that is what is happening.

I didn't see this problem when importing images that where in formats like TIFF or JPEG since these filetypes allow for metadata embedding.

So, if PictureSync can read iPhoto's keyword methodology then that may be your answer.

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