Copies of ALL photos placed in Originals folder

[Burns Fisher]

Hi,

I have (unfortunately) iPhoto 9.4.2, and I'm trying to give it up, maybe switch to Picasa.  Anyway, I used Phoshare 1.5.2 to export the whole library with "Export Originals" checked.  I expected photos that I had edited to have the edited version show up in the folder named for the iPhoto event, and the original file show up in the Originals subfolder.  What is happening is that EVERY file is being duplicated. 

 It also looks as though it is running the exif tool on every single photo (which may be right, although I don't have GPS or caption info for most of the pictures).  

This does not seem like correct behavior...am I messing something up?

Thanks!  Burns 

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Here is an excerpt from the output of Phoshare:

Running exiftool for /Users/Burns/Pictures/Picasa Photos/Jaipur/Originals/IMG_1090.jpg

New file: /Users/Burns/Pictures/Picasa Photos/Jaipur/IMG_1091.jpg (copy)

Running exiftool for /Users/Burns/Pictures/Picasa Photos/Jaipur/IMG_1091.jpg

New file: /Users/Burns/Pictures/Picasa Photos/Jaipur/Originals/IMG_1091.jpg (copy)

Running exiftool for /Users/Burns/Pictures/Picasa Photos/Jaipur/Originals/IMG_1091.jpg

New file: /Users/Burns/Pictures/Picasa Photos/Jaipur/IMG_1092.jpg (copy)

Running exiftool for /Users/Burns/Pictures/Picasa Photos/Jaipur/IMG_1092.jpg

New file: /Users/Burns/Pictures/Picasa Photos/Jaipur/Originals/IMG_1092.jpg (copy)

[Tilman]

- Exporting all originals: With iPhoto 9.4.2, Phoshare no longer has access to information about edits. So yes, you will get two files for each photo in your library, and they might be identical.

- Running exiftool on all images: Even if you don't have any GPS or caption info, Phoshare still needs to check the image, in case there is some old caption text in the image file. It will change it to match what you have in iPhoto - which in this case means to erase it.

Tilman

[Burns Fisher]

Thank you very much.  I must have misunderstood a previous post...I thought Phoshare attempted to match up the edited and original with some sort of heuristic.  Ah well...yet ANOTHER reason to give iPhoto the boot.

[David Rosen]

I'm going through the same thing, trying to switch to Lightroom with a library of 60,000 photos. (By the way, iPhoto is quite unstable with a collection this large.) I found a tool called DupeGuru-PE (which is free if you follow the instructions in the license) that compares the image contents using some algorithm, and unfortunately the situation is worse than I had thought. These are a couple problems I'm seeing:

  (a) As you mentioned, many of the originals are exact copies of the modified image.

  (b) iPhoto re-saves photos for reasons other than actually editing them (resulting in quality loss). I have maybe 30,000 photos where the modified image is slightly different than the original, and I know I have not edited even close to that number. I can verify that the image has been changed by looking at the histogram in Lightroom, which clearly is different for the two versions of the photos. Though I can't visually see any difference in the photo, it bothers me to not have the original.

  (c) Occasionally, an entire event will have the originals from a different event. I'm assuming this is unavoidable, as PhoShare is guessing based on filenames and dates, as it cannot get this information from the iPhoto database.

I'm finding that (a) is easy to correct using DupeGuru, (b) is tricky, and (c) is worrisome. I've had some luck by exporting the results from DupeGuru to CSV, then using regexes in Sublime Text to massage that data into a bash script that moves and removes the files as I'd like.

When I trusted my collection to iPhoto, I knew most of the organization was being stored in a proprietary database format, but for some reason I assumed there would be a reasonable way to export the data. I never expected that iPhoto would make it so hard to get at the originals.

While this process is taking much longer than I anticipated, at least it's possible. Thank you so much, Tilman, for making this program.

Dave