Referencing Photos in iPhoto 6

lifelonglearner (apparently) - 04:29pm Jan 25, 2006 PST
via email - Jeffrey McPheeters

For me the best thing about iLife '06 is that iPhoto can now
reference photos outside of the standard database structure it
creates when importing photos. I am no longer forced to import photos
into iPhoto's arcane library structure. Now I can reference all those
photos from previous years that I've exported onto an archived hard
drive. Normally I use iView Media Pro for the archived images
(>60,000), and still do for many tasks. But it's nice to be able to
use iPhoto as well. Unfortunately, it doesn't have the nifty feature
of iView that allows it to auto-update a catalog/album of referenced
pics.

My workflow when capturing photos depends on which camera I'm using.
The Canon 20D shots are all RAW and go through iView>Capture 1
Pro>Tiff+Jpeg formats. The jpegs are imported into iPhoto and the
Tiffs are backed up to DVDs for use when wanting hi-res images to
print. At the end of the year, all the photos from that year are
archived to an external drive + backup DVDs, and stored in directory
structures based on events and topics. Then I delete the exported
files and albums from the iPhoto Library and start a new year.

With iPhoto 6 I have the option (in the Advance Preferences pane) to
re-import the archived images, as references only, by dragging a
particular folder of images into the album pane and it creates a new
album named for the folder, and creates reference jpegs for those
photos. It can be a photoshop file, TIFF, jpeg, Jp2, etc., even the
many 16 bit b&w and 48 bit TIFFs I have archived. It seems to import
all the image types I have in my archives. (I have a rapidly growing
archive of older, scanned slide images, stored as 48bit TIFF images).
I set the preferences to not import the files into the library, but
to simply create the shortcut/alias to them. In so doing, I now have
about 100 GB worth of photos available to me in my iPhoto Library
while only taking up an additional 1GB in reference images within my
actual iPhoto Library directory. If the drive(s) are not mounted,
those reference photos are still visible in iPhoto and it works fine,
however it will alert me that the drive is not mounted if I try to do
anything with the actual referenced image. Mounting the drive(s)
immediately alerts iPhoto and it goes on its merry way. I can even
move the original files around within that given drive, without
upsetting iPhoto. It seems to know where I moved the originals and
gladly keeps track of them, as long as it is on that drive.

It's not the perfect solution for me, yet, but I do enjoy having all
of my photos available to me in both iPhoto and iView Media Pro
because, depending on the project, both are invaluable to me. iView
Media Pro is less headache for general management of images files,
but it doesn't have iPhoto's integration features nor all of the
export features and plug-ins available to iPhoto. On the other hand,
iPhoto has nowhere near the categorizing and sorting capabilities of
iView Media Pro. Plus, iView is much faster for me in labeling and
culling through hundreds of photos from a trip or event. (I have yet
to see whether or not I will prefer Adobe's Lightroom or Apple's
Aperture for this kind of task.)

Some caveats:

First, importing nested folders simply imports ALL of the images into
a single album named for the parent folder. There's no way, yet, for
iPhoto to create albums and sub-albums, or create folders with sub-
folders. I don't mind so much, because all of these archived photos
are imported to a folder in iPhoto called 'Archives' and any
referenced image in iPhoto has a contextual menu option to 'Reveal
Original in Finder' and once there, I can easily find the other TIFF,
JPEG, and PSD variations I may have created at one time, (and I'll
know immediately which DVD will have the original RAW image stored).
You may, of course, create a nested folder hierarchy manually, then
drag a folder of images to the album pane, and once imported, drag
the newly created album into the folder or sub-folder of your choice.
My 'Archives' folder contains sub-folders within it by year, and then
within each year are the individual albums named for the folder name
in which the original image files reside on an external hard drive
devoted to digital image archives. This structure pretty much mirrors
the overall structure on the external drive.

Although iPhoto could be used to keep track of photos stored on disc,
for example, and you could mount that disc anytime you wanted, in
order to add the photo to a book project or slide show, etc., (you
could not edit it, of course, without duplicating it, first),...
iPhoto doesn't seem to want to inform the user much about the
original source/path other than to say it's not mounted.

Also, with any referenced images that are duplicated or edited,
iPhoto places the copy or edited version within the iPhoto Library
folder structure. I think that it is possible to create a rather
messy assortment of referenced images, originals, and edited versions
in the process of using this method. It doesn't have the built-in
clean-up procedures that other mature cataloging tools such as iView
have at their disposal.

Finally, while iPhoto does allow sharing of albums, it treats folders
of albums as one big album, so you lose the organization you created
when accessing from other systems. Thus, if I have a folder inside
'Archives' named '2003 Archives', within which are 40 albums or
additional folders with albums, totaling some 6,000 photos, the
networked viewer simply sees an album called Archives and all 6000
photos are within at the same level of all the other many thousands
of images. For this reason, I don't share these referenced albums
directly, but rather, create new shared albums with just the photos
that might need to be available to myself from another system on the
network.

For me, iPhoto 5 became pretty useful for managing recent or oft-used
jpeg files, as long as I had a way to work around the primary
limitation of keeping all images organized within the iPhoto Library
structure itself. It did not allow me to do what iTunes does: the
ability to store images outside that structure while still using them
as if they were within the structure. But now it does, so iPhoto 06
is pretty useful to me in many more ways than ever before. I used to
export archived photos from iView to re-add them to iPhoto for
projects that benefited by iPhoto-integration, then remove them
afterward. I don't think I'll need to do that any longer, although
there may still be some clean-up work to do from time to time.
Hopefully someone will write some scripts that will aid in some of
the housekeeping chores this workflow method may necessitate.

To close this rather long comment, I will note that with iPhoto 5,
storing many RAW files tended to slow down iPhoto even on a my dual
1.8Ghz G5 with 2.5GB of ram and large hard drives with plenty of free
space. Currently I have around 1500 images stored in the iPhoto
Library (these average about 4MB each and are mostly jpeg edits from
original RAW images stored elsewhere; all taken since Jan. 1 -- I
shoot nearly 50,000 photos per year and keep about 1/10th of them).
In addition to the 1500 images stored in the iPhoto Library, I have
another 30,000 images selected from the archives and referenced in
iPhoto 6. So far iPhoto still scrolls smoothly and I think it feels
much faster than it ever did before. So I'm somewhat optimistic, at
this point, that iPhoto can more easily integrate into my regular
workflow in a way that enhances rather than degrades my digital
photography hobby.

Jeffrey McPheeters