Tag Archives: iphoto

Using Dropbox as a photo management app »

September 17th, 2012

This is intriguing. Stephen Hacket took a que from Frederico Viticci on ditching iPhoto/Aperture and just using directories stored on Dropbox as a way to manage photos.

After reading it, I started to think about why I continue to suffer with use Aperture. I rarely use it edit my photos, and really prefer it over iPhoto just for the organization in to projects.

Suffer is exactly the right word. Using my Macbook Pro without an SSD with Aperture is really an exercise in frustration. Even if I create brand new libraries for each month of photos that I take it is still entirely too slow to be useful. Closing Aperture takes about 8 minutes. And I’m with Hackett. I only use Aperature to easily manage/find photos later on. But clearly it isn’t working for me.

In fact, iPhoto and Aperture have the opposite effect on me. Rather than making it easier to manage and edit photos it is actually much, much harder. So much harder that I’ve taken less and less photos with my DSLR over the last few years. In spite of really wanting to take more and more.

I’m going to do a little more research into the method that these two have laid out but I’m going to consider ditching photo manager applications for a straight directory structure.

/via Stephen Hackett.

Finding possible duplicate photos in iPhoto using Smart Albums

March 26th, 2010

Yesterday I said that I’d share the many ways in which I use Smart Albums in iPhoto. Instead of sharing all of the ways in one post I figured I’d break them up. One of my Smart Albums helps me to locate possible duplicate photos. Here is why and how this works.

I stress possible duplicates because this Smart Album is neither fool proof nor genius. This is a dead simple Smart Album yet it seems to get the vast majority of duplicate photos in my personal photo library. Perhaps it can help you too.

So, why are there duplicates in the first place?

iPhoto has built-in duplicate photo detection on import. It warns you when it finds what it believes might be a duplicate photo to one that is already in your photo library. iPhoto does a fairly good job at this too and it is based on filename and date/time.

In my own personal experience I’ve found that 90% of my duplicate photos happened because of something that happened just prior to the import process. In some cases it was simply that my Macintosh automatically added a _1 or _2 to the photo’s filename because it already existed in a folder that I was using to store photos prior to importing them into iPhoto. This happens, perhaps, when both my wife and I are storing photos on a laptop while traveling and waiting until we return home to import them into iPhoto.

Since iPhoto does not check the binary of the photo nor does it recognize duplicates based on some sort of ‘visual’ check then some of these duplicate photos slip by. What we end up with is two, or sometimes three, photos that match each other in every way but filename.

For this specific case of duplicate photos that share everything except filename I’ve come up with this simple Smart Album that seems to do a good job at finding most of the duplicates in my photo library. Here are the rules.

This simple Smart Album simply looks for images where the filename ends in _2.jpg, _2.JPG, _1.jpg or _1.JPG. (iPhoto’s Smart Albums are case sensitive.) Usually what you’ll end up with, but you should definitely verify with your main library before you delete any of them, is a bunch of duplicate photos that have a match in your library and can probably be deleted. To delete the photos from your main library from within this Smart Album see How to: Delete photos from within Smart Albums in iPhoto.

When I first created this Smart Album for my personal photo library of around 52,000 photos it filtered out little over 1,100 as duplicates. After going through each of them to verify that they were indeed duplicates I ended up being able to delete about 900 of them. Not too shabby.

How to: Delete photos from within Smart Albums in iPhoto

March 25th, 2010

"Move to trash" inactive.

I use Smart Albums in iPhoto for a number of reasons, which I plan on covering in an upcoming post, but every once and a while I find a few photos that I’d like to delete. Not just delete from the Smart Album but actually delete from my entire Library. Until today I had not figured out how to do that.

The problem: When you have a photo selected in a Smart Album and you want to delete it the ‘Move to trash’ option in the Photos menu is inactive. I thought I had tried every single key combination I could think of, tried dragging the photo, tried to “find the photo in the Library” (like iTunes can do) and still nothing seemed to work.

The solution: Dom Barnes came to my rescue on Twitter. The magic keystroke is CMD + OPT + DEL. Or, Command, Option and Delete, when you have the photo(s) selected that you want to delete. This will move those photos to the Trash (even though iPhoto doesn’t show you this option anywhere).

This is going to save me a lot of time. Thanks Dom.

Music and photos are not accessible from the Media Browser

July 28th, 2009

If you, like me, recently updated to a new Macintosh – you may have had this issue. It turns out that if you upgrade your version of Mac OS X to the latest version, install the latest iLife 09 updates, and use Migration Assistant to move from your old Mac to your new one – your music and photos may no longer be accessible from the Media Browser.

Thanks to Apple for providing a solution in relatively short order.

How to: Delete all photos off an iPhone

June 16th, 2008

Update: Somewhat unrelated, new post called How to: Delete photos from within Smart Albums in iPhoto.

For an entire year I’ve wanted to be able to do this easily. And I think I’ve now found the best way to do this without the possible side-effect of losing all of your photos on your iPhone.

One of the problems with the iPhone is that you can’t delete all of the photos you’ve taken within from within the iPhone’s interface. If you, like me, sync your iPhone photos with your iPhoto Library then you’ve no doubt noticed that iPhoto does let you delete all of the photos you are currently importing. But, if you’ve imported several times then iPhoto will only allow you to delete the current photos being imported.

So you’re only option has been to create a new iPhoto Library, import all of your iPhone’s photos again, and ask iPhoto to delete the photos when the task is complete. Or, you could click delete on every single photo on your iPhone one-at-a-time.

Solution: Use Image Capture.

My iPhoto Library has become very cumbersome. Opening iPhoto is a chore. Also, with the iPhone in its dock, iPhoto will compare its library with the one on the iPhone prior to allow you to import the new photos – and this takes a very long time. So, I’m going to show you how to use Image Capture, an application on your Macintosh that you may not even know you have, to create a backup of your iPhone’s photos and, subsequentally, delete them from the iPhone – in one step.

  1. Mount your iPhone using either your dock or the iPhone’s USB cable.
  2. If you have iTunes or iPhoto set to open automatically, eject the iPhone from both of these applications.
  3. Open Image Capture.app ((You can find this application in your Applications folder.))
  4. Create a new directory to dump your iPhone photos to.
  5. Click “Options” and select “Delete items from camera after downloading”
  6. Click “Download all”.

Here are some photos of the process.


Image capture.


New folder.


Delete the photos.


Empty camera roll result.

Depending on how many photos you have on your iPhone this process may take a little while. When the downloading is complete, the iPhone’s photos will be deleted – permanently.

What if you want to save some of the photos on your iPhone? This can be done but it takes some work. After you’ve imported all of these photos into your iPhoto Library, create a new album in iPhoto called something like “iPhone camera roll”. In your iTunes preferences for this iPhone ((You’ll need to mount the iPhone again to see these options in iTunes.)) select this album for syncing. This way you only save the photos that you have put into this album.

I hope this helps those of you that want to delete their iPhone’s photos in a quick and easy way without worrying about losing your photos!

Why I’m excited about Google Gears

June 1st, 2007

For those reading this that may not know what Google Gears does allow me to give a little bit of background on the situation and explain how, in general, web applications work.

Web applications are different then the applications you run on your computer in two very specific and obvious ways. First, they are run completely in your web browser (Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, etc.) and you do not need to download or install any local files for the application to function. Second, the data that the application stores or edits is not on your local machine but rather saved “on the Internet”. These may seem like very obvious differences but I’ve mentioned these two reasons because the paradigm has shifted overtime and Google Gears almost completes that shift.

One of the many mantras of “Web 2.0″ applications has been to freely allow users of these applications to have access to their data both via an API and being able to “export” their data into various formats. These APIs afforded many developers to blur the line between desktop and web applications – such as being able to geotag your photos in iPhoto using Google Maps – but these solutions still required an Internet connection for them to work properly. Something also to note is the fact that these APIs are mainly used by developers and not by the users themselves so even though the data was portable, this fact hasn’t been exploited by the average user much, yet.

Enter Google Gears – which provides developers with the needed technology to make their entire applications portable not just the data. The first example Google chose to show off Gears with is Google Reader (a really great example). Google Reader, up until a few days ago, was a way to read your favorite sites by subscribing to their feeds but its use was limited to when you were connected to the Internet. Google Gears allows you to use Google Reader, at least most of the application, offline. You connect to the Internet, download your latest feed subscription’s updates, get offline, and you’re still able to read the feeds that you’ve cached on your local system. What’s more is that you are able to flag those items and Google Reader will sync with your Google Reader account once an Internet connection is available.

In short; Google Gears brings your favorite web applications to your local computer and allows them to run almost like desktop applications.

Why am I excited? Because my main reason for not using some of the most popular web applications has been because I can not use them offline. I am a firm believer in having all of my data available to me at anytime. Unfortunately in some cases, such as my photo and music libraries becoming larger than my laptop’s hard drive, I’ve had to make sacrifices. However, when it comes to much smaller yet more important pieces of data such as email messages, bookmarks, and important documents I can not afford to make those sacrifices. As Google Gears is adopted and implemented in more web applications I’ll be able to begin using them offline.

I’ve switched back to iPhoto from Aperture

May 25th, 2007

So a few weeks ago I asked for help to switch back to iPhoto from Aperture. I had a few issues that I wasn’t able to solve myself so I asked the masses for some direction.

Turns out I did learn a few things from the conversations this post, and the Apple discussion board post, that I created. But, nothing that came through those channels provided me with the solution I needed.

But I lucked out! I was digging through some old backups and I found that I backed up my photo library just before switching to Aperture on February 12th of this year. All I needed to do was open the backup, import any photos I took since that day, and move some libraries around and poof! I’m back in iPhoto and loving it.

As I stated, and before anyone gets a little woozy about using Aperture for their photo cataloging needs, the only reasons I am switching back are mentioned in this post. Nothing more. I really like Aperture but I can not deal with those two caveats (unfortunately). I look forward to giving Aperture, or perhaps Lightroom, another look in the future.

I need help switching back to iPhoto

May 11th, 2007

In February of this year I switched from iPhoto to Aperture for very specific reasons. My laptop’s hard drive was running out of space, as it was housing my photo library that was quickly approaching 25,000 photos and pushing about 30 Gigabytes, and I wanted to take advantage of Aperture‘s ability to store photo masters on an external drive.

So why switch back? When I described why I had switched and my experiences doing so back in February I had said that I ran into many problems all of which I was able to solve save two:

The two things I have yet to solve, which are rather large things: 1) Spotlight can no longer find my photos since switching to [edit: from] iPhoto. I am really not sure where to start with fixing this so I think I’m just going to have to ask someone. 2) Reorganizing my keywords in Aperture (since I had them set up in iPhoto) is impossible. When I bring up the Keywords HUD, I’m greeted with all of my keywords residing subordinately to a master keyword of ‘iPhoto’. When I try to access the keywords that are “below” iPhoto Aperture freezes. Perhaps I have too many keywords (I do have an awful lot). I’m not sure how to solve this one yet either. Maybe there is a raw .plist file that I can manually edit (and I am willing to do so).

After using Aperture for the past 3+ months I’ve yet to resolve either of these issues. Recently there was an update to Aperture from Apple that, according to the documentation for the update, was supposed to help resolve my second issue with having too many keywords for Aperture to handle – but it hasn’t helped much. So since switching to Aperture I’ve not tagged more than maybe fifty photos, which is discouraging because I know that once I switch back to iPhoto I’m going to be busy tagging photos again.

So I suppose you could say I’m switching back for two main reasons. First, I want it to be much easier to tag my photos since that is probably the single most important thing to me and the experience with iPhoto and Keyword Manager is far superior to that of using keywords in Aperture. Second, I want my photos to start showing up in Spotlight searches again. I’m more than willing to deal with the caveat, albeit a rather large one, that I won’t have my photos with me wherever I go anywhere but that they’ll forever reside on my firewire drive.

What I need help with…

When I open iPhoto I see all of the previews for the photos that I had the day I switched to Aperture. However, the originals have been moved by Aperture onto my firewire drive – so when I click on each photo all I get is a ( ! ) symbol. The previews still reference a file that does not exist yet the iPhoto database still retains all of the relevant metadata (date/time, keywords, comments, etc) that I had worked so hard to put into iPhoto. I need to retain this information and somehow get the originals back into place so that iPhoto sees them again.

What I thought about doing was this: 1) Somehow restore the originals for the almost 25,000 photos into the place where iPhoto thinks they should be. 2) Move the entire library to my external firewire drive. 3) Import the remaining images that I’ve taken since switching to Aperture into iPhoto.

Since I have Aperture store my photos by date – importing only the images that I’ve imported into Aperture should be a piece of cake. I do not need to retain any metadata from Aperture since I’ve only tagged a few photos in Aperture and all of the other information I may need should be on the original file (like date taken, etc.). I know I’m going to lose a lot of edits that I’ve done like cropping, rotating, color balancing, red-eye reduction, etc. but I’m more than willing to lose all of that if it means that I can pick up where I left off and get back into the swing of things in iPhoto.

I’ve Googled like crazy and haven’t found someone doing exactly what I’m trying to accomplish so any help with my current situation is greatly appreciated. I’ve also posted this on the Apple Discussion boards.

[tags]apple, aperture, iphoto, google, photo library, help, firewire, external, switch, restore[/tags]
[slug]back-to-iphoto[/slug]

Keyword Manager for iPhoto

November 22nd, 2006

I was half expecting to write a very long, detailed review of the Keyword Manager for iPhoto. However, I will not. I will just say that if you are the type of person that is willing to invest in their personal data’s future – and the ability to find it quickly and easily, the Keyword Manager for iPhoto is your key.

Personally, I recommend paying full price for the Keyword Manager. It is completely worth it, and the support is top notch. There are ways to save money (via MacZot today only, and using Coupon Codes that you can find just about everywhere), but I suggest strongly that you purchase a copy at full price.

John Gruber said it best “Aim for high quality and set your price accordingly.”. The developers of Keyword Manager have done just that, and while they are trying to get their name out there with these promotions – I still believe that this is one plugin that is worth more than it’s price tag.

[tags]iphoto, apple, macintosh, keywords, tagging, bullstorm, keyword manager, john gruber, daringfireball, maczot[/tags]
[slug]keyword-mananger[/slug]

Leopard wish list – Part four: Finder

November 16th, 2006

My wish list for the Finder is not as extensive as other’s will be. Partly because I do not have as many complaints about the Finder as I’ve seen long-time Mac users have – particularly those you came from OS 7, 8, and/or 9.

Fixes

As I said, my list of fixes will be pretty short.

An unlimited number of labels would be where I’d start. If you open your preferences in Finder you have a Labels area that gives you a selection of 7 colors that you can change the names of, to fit the label. I use this feature rather sparingly so I can actually get what I need labeled within the 7-label-limit – however why is this a limitation at all? Why not have a quick + button that lets you select a color, name the label, and you are off to the races. Perhaps it has to do with people deleting labels that scares Apple from including such a feature.

Saved searches are currently the only folders that allow you to view things “like Spolight” windows show files. By kind, date, etc. If you create a smart folder you can see a new view button at the top – but yet you can not view those on other folders. I think it’d be neat to have that view across the system, not just within saved searches.

Keyword autocomplete when doing a keyword search is really annoying. If you do a search within Finder, then click + and add a Keyword filter – Finder will load your list of keywords from your entire system (including those in iPhoto). On my Macbook it took about 20 seconds to do this (good ole’ beachball meantime), and then it autocompleted anything I typed. Instead of being able to type in partial names (i.e. Paul), it forced me to search for a specific Paul. Here’s the annoying part, I have 7 people that I know with the first name of Paul, and 8 that I know with the last name of Paul. Turn the autocomplete off.

DMG mounts should not automatically be opened with the finder in “collapsed mode”. I am not sure where to throw the blame here – if it is Apple, the developer who packaged the DMG, or something that I’ve set on my system. But I have never once wanted to keep Finder in collapsed view since I will eventually have to drag the application into my applications folder to install it.

Feature requests

There is a lot of hoopla about having tabs and other various things, but I’m not sure I’m on board with that yet.

Better media browsing when you are viewing a folder filled with images, movies, or audio. Right now if I’m viewing a directory full of JPGs I can view it in thumbnail (or tile) view, and then open my preferences and bump up the size of the thumbnails. But why not an iPhoto like slider for this type of thing? Why not have a quick way to sort by date, kind, or keyword?

Apple should start taking some of the functionality back out of the applications that it creates and start putting those features into the operating system. Make it just as easy to find a photo in Finder as it is to do in iPhoto.

Final thoughts

See, that wasn’t so bad. I’m sure the improvements to Finder in Leopard will be pretty broad. Not only because of the amount of criticism that has flew – but also because there will be new features that it needs to support (such as Time Machine).

I’m not sure I want to see it change too much though – and if it becomes anything as bloated as Path Finder I may just have to revolt!

Note: Be sure to check out other parts of my Leopard wish list listed below:

  1. Part one: Safari
  2. Part two: Mail
  3. Part three: iChat
  4. Part three: Finder

[tags]finder, macintosh, apple, mac os x, osx, leopard, wish list, iphoto, keywords, searching[/tags]
[slug]leopard-wishes-pt4-finder[/slug]

Leopard wish list – Part three: iChat

November 14th, 2006

Another application within the Mac OS that is open for most of my day is iChat. Many have chosen to use third-party chatting applications like Adium – but the ability to hold audio and video conferences, and transferring files to those on my list, proves to be indispensable features for me.

Fixes

I hope not to sound as if I use iChat begrudgingly because, on the contrary, I rarely find fault with iChat during my normal usage. However if I really turn a critical eye to it, I find:

Error messages should be more descriptive when a video or audio conference, or file transfer fails. Many times there are issues with NATs or Firewalls getting in the way of iChat trying to make connections. iChat typically reports with an error message along the lines of “blah blah blah”. If iChat could have a built-in utility to test your connection for possible problems, and then offer ways of solving those problems based on it’s findings – that’d be cool.

Better Address Book integration is something that I’ve long for since the beginning. Both Adium and iChat both pull your contacts address cards to add buddies to your list – however they also hold their own lists separate from the address book. I’d like to see every contact held within iChat to be in the address book, and vice-versa, by default. What typically happens is, if I sign up for a new AIM account, and load up iChat – I will be forced to go in and add each buddy from my address book into iChat – rather than it just recognizing them. Perhaps there is a reason that they do not do this (perhaps some would find it annoying) – but for me – I think it’d be neat to at least have the option.

File transfers that don’t work when video and audio do seems really strange to me. If I am talking to someone on video and I try to send them a file, and it doesn’t work, that seems strange to me. Why can we make a connection for audio or video and not for transferring files?

Update the tooltips which are used to show your buddy’s info. If you hover over a buddy, you can see some quick information about them – usually their AIM name, and current status. Like Adium, I’d like to see this updated to show a larger version of your buddy’s icon – along with a way to quickly send them an email, an invitation to an event in iCal, a link to the song currently playing in iTunes, etc. This could also be considered a feature request, but I’ll get more into that in a second.

Feature requests

There are a few of my feature requests that delve slightly into what we already know will be included in the next release – but bear with me because I think they need to be refined a little more.

System-wide iChat integration could go well beyond what we see now with Mail and Address Book. Currently you can see who is online from within Mail (if you have that particular email address associated with the current AIM username), and also from within Address Book. This is sufficient in my opinion though anywhere address book information is used (i.e. in the Address Book widget), it’d be nice to see a person’s online status as well.

However, there are many more ways I’d like to see iChat integrated into the OS. If we take a look at the four reasons I currently use iChat, perhaps we can see a way to integrate it more.

1. Text messaging. There are several ways I could see this being used. Contextual menus in Safari, as just one example, give you a way to “Search in Spotlight” and “Search in Google” when you have highlighted text. Perhaps “Send to buddy” would also be available instead of having the need to copy/paste all the time. This may seem like a very small thing, but just think of the amount of time it could save.

Perhaps this feature could be extended a bit further to actually be an option from within Pages.

2. Audio chat. Audio chat should not be limited to only sharing one’s voice. With a little jiggery pokery, or software like Audio Hijack Pro and Soundflower, one could potentially share their tunes with someone working remotely out of the office or with a computer not directly connected to the LAN. Or, maybe two people would like to collaborate on a project in GarageBand, and they could do so by “porting” the output of GarageBand in the current audio chat.

The implications could be fairly endless here.

3. Video chat. Just like with Audio chat, I’d like to see a way to share video via the video chat feature. I realize that the upcoming release will have some screen sharing, iPhoto slideshow, and other features. But being able to open iMovie and show someone a rough cut of a project their working on – could prove extremely valuable.

4. File transfers. What about being able to send a file from anywhere in the system to someone on your buddy list? You can do this now by dragging that file onto your buddy’s name in your contact list – but what if you could do it from within the application you are working on the file with. Say I’d like to send that same rough cut of the iMovie project to someone so that they can edit it further. Emailing it is not an option (too big). I could send it to him in iChat but that means I’d have to save it, open finder (or use Spotlight) and drag the file onto their name ect. What about a button to “Send to Buddy”?

Update (9am on Nov. 15): It turns out there is a product for doing something like this with Skype. It was written about on TechCrunch. Interesting.

I could also envision this feature being awesome from within iPhoto. Quickly send someone an entire album. Sure, this would bypass Apple’s .Mac photo-sharing service built-into iPhoto. But I think .Mac sucks.

Final thoughts

As I said, I really don’t have many issues with the current iChat. Not enough to make me jump ship to something like Adium (which I would have to write a 5-part piece to say what I don’t like about it). I’m going to stick with iChat – and I’m looking forward to the new stuff coming up.

Note: Be sure to check out other parts of my Leopard wish list listed below:

  1. Part one: Safari
  2. Part two: Mail
  3. Part three: iChat
  4. Part three: Finder

[tags]apple, macintosh, mac os x, osx, wish list, leopard, ichat, buddy list, aim, adium, audio hijack pro, soundflower, safari, spotlight, mail, garageband, imovie, iphoto, finder, itunes[/tags]
[slug]leopard-wishes-pt3-ichat[/slug]

Leopard wish list – Part two: Mail

November 13th, 2006

I’m not as much of a power-user of Mail as I probably could be. There are features of Mail that I simply do not use, and therefore my request for Mail are rather light. However, I do feel that some of my requests make sense, so hopefully they will be included in Leopard.

Fixes

Here are some things that I believe should be fixed in Mail.

Smart Mailbox rules are seemingly complete – though I find one oddity among them. When you select the “Message is in Mailbox” filter, you are presented with every Mailbox you’ve setup – even the Smart Mailboxes that you’ve already created. However, if you select the “Message is not in Mailbox” filter, you are not given the Smart Mailboxes as options. I’ve thought about this for awhile, and I still can’t figure out the reason.

The search box should allow for multiple filters such as you find in the current Finder. Searching for a subject, then being able to click + to drill down until you find what you are looking for. I have about 12,500 pieces of email, and finding the 1 that I am looking for can sometimes prove difficult with a single search filter.

The address book panel seems very OS 9-ish. It works, but I’d like to see the design of this updated a bit.

Feature requests

I realize that Mail is getting “a significant upgrade” when Leopard is release, though the major feature additions looked atrocious in my opinion. Here are some things I’d like to see.

The iLife Media Browser would be an awesome addition to Mail’s default set of icons on the New Mail window. Attaching photos from your iPhoto Library is quick and easy – if you already have iPhoto open. I envision a time where we can click on the Media Browser (similar to what you find in Pages, iMove, etc) and find a photo or photos and attach them with ease.

Side note: The new version of Mail will have “stationary” – and from what I can tell from the screenshots released so far there is a new button called “Photo Browser” at the top. I hope that this is not a brand-new, non-standard media browser that does not use the same frameworks that are used throughout the system so far. And, I hope that this button is not only enabled when you choose a particular style of stationary that allows for photos. We need this feature to be available any time we want to send normal attachments.

An all new way to attach files would be nice. Utilizing a media browser to attached photos, audio, and perhaps even video – would be nice. But I can see definite improvements that could be made to attaching documents, spreadsheets, and compressed archives too.

Imagine you need to attach an Excel spreadsheet, a PDF document, and a .Zip file full of product images to an email. When you do this, I would like to see a preview of the document that I am going to attach. (This does currently work with PDFs and Images) I’d like to see previews for Excel spreadsheets, Text files, Rich-Text Files, Word Documents, .Pages documents, Keynote Presentations, and anything else that usually resides in the document window.

As per .Zip archive files, it’d be nice to select a zip file in the “attach file” panel and be able to see the file names of the files within the archive. This would ensure that I’ve selected the correct file to attach.

Automatic compression of multiple file attachments is something that was “introduced” by AOL back in the mid to late 90s. I have not used America Online since then, so I have no idea if this feature still exists.

If I had an email with multiple attachments, as described above, Mail could automatically compress those files on send. This way, the transmission of data would be slightly smaller. On the other end, Mail.app would uncompress those files into their original state prior to displaying the message to the recipient.

Side note: The biggest problem with this feature in AOL (circa version 2 or 3) was that when you sent email to anyone that was not an AOL user, they’d just get a .zip file. Back in those days .zip files were not yet the norm, and so you had to have people go to winzip.com or something to download a utility to uncompress those files. In other words, their email client did not have the “automatically uncompress files upon receipt” feature. Annoying to say the least.

The other problem with this is, Mail would have to have a slightly proprietary compression format so that when a .zip, .tar, .bz (etc) type of file would come in, it wouldn’t always uncompress those files. If I was sent 1,000 text files in a .zip archive, I wouldn’t want those files automatically uncompressed by Mail.

Final thoughts

I’m trying not to be too picky, otherwise this list would get quite long. Any application that is used as often as an email client always gets more than it’s share of scrutiny. I’m fairly happy with my email client to-date, and I hope that the trend continues.

Side note: Leopard Mail will include Stationary, Notes, To-Dos, and RSS feed reading ability. From what I’ve seen so far, I do not “like” any of them (even though what I did see would be considered BETA).

The Stationary seems a bit superfluous though I can see people having a ball using them. The Notes doesn’t make sense to me yet simply because I do not email myself notes. There are hundreds of ways to “take notes” on the Mac OS ranging from widgets to small menu bar applications to full-blown GTD applications. The “to-dos” in Mail seem like they’d be better kept and updated within iCal. I’m sure the integration between iCal and Mail will be might tighter this time around – so I’ll have to see that integration prior to passing judgement.

RSS within Mail is a completely new headache to me. RSS feeds within Safari is only made for those people who keep track of a few web sites. With constant attention to feed management you may even be able to get away with having 100 subscriptions in Safari without pulling your hair out. Unless the integration of RSS feeds (which should be called “Feeds” but we’ve already talked about that), rivals that of NetNewsWire, then I see no improvement than using Safari for your subscriptions. Too much synergy may not be a good thing in this case.

Note: Be sure to check out other parts of my Leopard wish list listed below:

  1. Part one: Safari
  2. Part two: Mail
  3. Part three: iChat
  4. Part three: Finder

[tags]apple, macintosh, mac os x, osx, mail.app, mail, iphoto, ilife, safari, leopard, mac os 10.5, wish list, ical, gtd, stationary, notes, to-dos, rss[/tags]
[slug]leopard-wishes-pt2-mail[/slug]

Gettin’ waxed

October 30th, 2006

No, not my bikini area – our floors. In preparation for getting our floors waxed we had to move everything, thoroughly sweep and mop the floors, and put the cats in the office.

Pickles inspects the floor

Pickles inspecting the floor

After the cats approved of our floors, we put them away. Now I’m just waiting to do one final sweep and mop before we start putting on the coats of wax.

9:48 AM – What do you do when you’re waiting to wax the floor? Tag photos in iPhoto of course. I’m still playing catch-up on this front and I have a little over 8,500 photos that still need tagging. At least 15,000 that still need to be cataloged by event. And over 20,000 that need to be rated. Have you caught up?

9:52 AM – A quick question for all of you. I just came across roughly 1,000 photos that have the wrong date/time from the camera. This may have happened because the camera was set to 1/1/1999 for some reason after changing the batteries once. I am not sure exactly what date they were taken, but I’d really like to have them appear correctly chronologically.

What I’ve done, for now, is tag them with the keyword “wrongdate” so that I can get back to them later. Any ideas as to how best to figure out what date they were taken?

10:27 AM – My new way of getting caught up on assigning keywords to my photos has been tag layering. What I do is a first pass of tagging only people that appear in the photos. Then, I go back through and create albums for each “event”. Once that is done, I assign the appropriate geo tags, location tags, and even event tags.

I’ve found it is much more rewarding to do this in layers to help to keep moving forward, rather than only getting a few hundred photos done a day.

12:03 PM – Just finished mopping the entire floor. I did the best job I could, using Joy dish detergent (which is highly recommended to remove any oils from tile flooring), to make sure that the wax can make a good bond with the tile.

Now I’m just waiting for Mark (our friend who knows how to do this stuff) to get here so we can go pick up the materials needed to pull this off. What to do in the meantime?! *opens iPhoto again*

Rebuilding cache

Rebuilding cache

12:16 PM – iPhoto has been asking me to rebuild my thumbnail cache for quite sometime, so I finally gave in and selected to allow it to go ahead and do just that. Maybe this will give me a little better performance. My main question I guess is why iPhoto doesn’t build thumbnails on import, and if it does, why does it need to rebuild the cache? Oh, and why can’t it be more like the way iMovie or iDVD handles video compression and rendering and build the thumbnail caches in the background while still allowing me to do other things within iPhoto? I mean, I have “two processors” do I not?

7:37 PM – Three coats, and one chinese buffet later, we’re done. Now we just have to let the last coat cure before we start putting everything back onto the tile. It looks good, and should do well to protect the floor for years to come.

[tags]photos, pickles, animals, cat, floor, wax, keywords, tagging, iphoto, apple, macintosh, applications, software[/tags]

Using the calendar disables sharing in iPhoto

October 29th, 2006

I have so many posts about iPhoto in my “saved drafts” area that I figured it is time to get rid of one. This one deals with sharing photos in iPhoto – something that is a fairly painful process still.

In short, if you pull open a remote Library that you’d like to grab a few photos from, and use iPhoto’s built in calendar feature to filter that Library to a specific year/month – you will find it is impossible to drag those photos onto your local Library.

To restore the sharing ability, after having selected 142 photos in my case, I had to disable the calendar feature (by clicking the small X in the calendar) clicking on the main shared Library in the source, reselecting all of the photos I wanted, and dragging them onto my local Library.

Ugh. I might switch to Aperature sooner than later. But not until after I put it through the ringer to be sure that the main problems I’ve had with iPhoto do not exist also in Aperature.

[tags]iphoto, apple, macintosh, software, applications, sharing, bugs[/tags]

A few things I’ve learned while organizing my photo library

September 17th, 2006

I woke up earlier this week to read an announcement on TUG by Josue about the Keyword Assistant for iPhoto had been updated for the latest version of iPhoto and for Intel-based Macintoshes. I was thrilled!

But then it dawned on me the task that was ahead of me. I had been without the Keyword Assistant for months, and I refuse to use iPhoto’s built in tagging features, so I was months behind on the categorization of my photo library. Not to mention that I had never caught up in the first place.

Since the update was released I have been feverishly tagging my photos with their appropriate keywords. Even though it is an incredibly mundane process, it can get addictive. I try to fit the tagging of my photos into my everyday activities, so I do a few hundred at a time. I’m still behind by a little over 11,000 photos, which says a lot being that I’ve managed to get about 7,700+ done so far.

While I was going through this process, I’d been also rotating the photos, adding them to appropriate albums, and adjusting the date-taken on some. This process has led to the following few observations that I recommend all keep in mind.

Set the date on your camera

Your digital camera has a date setting that will be automatically added to each photos information when you take the photo. This helps with the sorting of your photos in chronological order. It may seem like a no-brainer, but when you get a new camera be sure to set the date and time before you start snapping photos. This will save you a lot of time in the long run.

Tag photos on import

If you are doing any type of keyword tagging, do it when you import your photos, rather than waiting until later. This will ensure that you don’t get behind on the process, and make your searching life much easier.

Learn from Flickr: Create albums

Flickr allows you to create photo sets (or albums). These can be used for absolutely anything, grouping photos together at your will rather than by meta-data. For example, you can have an album full of photos of yourself, your friends, and lightning – and it wouldn’t matter. Albums are less for classification and more for getting to a group of photos easily.

My suggestion is to create albums based on events to find photos quickly and easily.

Back up your photo library

Again, this might seem like a “duh” – but you’d be doing yourself a huge favor if you backed up your entire photo library. I have my entire photo library on a separate firewire drive, as well as on DVD. If I was really smart I’d take those DVDs and put them in someone else’s home, this way if my home burnt down and I lost all my computer equipment, I’d still have our photos. The same could be said for music, documents, work files, etc. Burn a few DVDs worth of information and toss them to your closest friend to put in their closet. It may just make the difference someday.

So, after I follow the tips above I have three main ways that I categorize my photos. The first would be date. By having accurate dates and times on my photos I can quickly use the calendar feature and find photos from any date in my digital photo taking history. The second would be by keyword. Each photo is tagged with keywords relating to what is in the photo. People, places, and things is what I usually follow – though sometimes I also add the event into the mix. The third way, is by photo albums. I have photo albums for every vacation, as an example. This allows me to quickly rifle through every single photo I’ve taken on all my vacations, or I can limit it by a specific date range (i.e. all photos I’ve taken on vacation in 2004) or by specific vacation like all the vacation photos I’ve taken in 2004 in Myrtle Beach.

I still have a very long way to go, and hopefully I’ll find even better ways to categorize my photos that makes it fun to go back and find stuff accurately and quickly. But now, I’ve got 11,000 photos to tag.

[tags]iphoto, photo library, keyword assistant, photos, tagging, keywords[/tags]

10MacApps

April 21st, 2006

Merely days after saying that I never get invited to do memes, here comes one from Zach Hale.

Here is a list of my 10 13 favorite applications for the Macintosh.

I was supposed to stop at 10, but oh well. There is no particular order to the above, I kind of just jotted these down as I thought of them.

I suppose I’ll ask Mike Stickel, Tantek Çelik, and Mike Rundle to do the same.

[tags]meme, apple, macintosh, applications, textmate, netnewswire, marsedit, quicksilver, itunes, iphoto, delicious library, safari, transmit, colloquy, php function index, php, ichat, chax, mail, email, programming, browser, text editor[/tags]