iPhoto Question

[MotionMan]

I have ALL my photos on a NAS which I use to access with my Windows machine. I imported all of the photos into iPhoto. Does that mean that all my photos now reside in an iPhoto directory somewhere on my Mac? If so, where should that be?

MotionMan

 

[TheStu]

The iPhoto Library is located in the Pictures Folder on your Mac. The way it is handled is not unlike most applications, the folder is an icon, but you can 'Show Package Contents' by right clicking on it and get into it.

I recommend not manually messing with the things in there if you are using iPhoto.

 

[little elvis]

Originally posted by: MotionMan
I have ALL my photos on a NAS which I use to access with my Windows machine. I imported all of the photos into iPhoto. Does that mean that all my photos now reside in an iPhoto directory somewhere on my Mac? If so, where should that be?

MotionMan

It depends, in iPhoto preferences, under the advance tab, if you've checked "copy imported photos to you iPhoto library", then all your photos will be copied to the pictures directory on your Mac. If not, nothing will be copied over, and iPhoto will access you pictures from your NAS.

 

[MotionMan]

Originally posted by: little elvis

Originally posted by: MotionMan
I have ALL my photos on a NAS which I use to access with my Windows machine. I imported all of the photos into iPhoto. Does that mean that all my photos now reside in an iPhoto directory somewhere on my Mac? If so, where should that be?

MotionMan

It depends, in iPhoto preferences, under the advance tab, if you've checked "copy imported photos to you iPhoto library", then all your photos will be copied to the pictures directory on your Mac. If not, nothing will be copied over, and iPhoto will access you pictures from your NAS.

Ah, I seem to remember that preference (I have boon looking through all hr settings for each app as I get to them). I am pretty sure I had them copied to the library.

And, even so, it sounds like I can access the individual photos outside of iPhoto, should I desire? Cool.

MotionMan

 

[mugs]

Originally posted by: little elvis

Originally posted by: MotionMan
I have ALL my photos on a NAS which I use to access with my Windows machine. I imported all of the photos into iPhoto. Does that mean that all my photos now reside in an iPhoto directory somewhere on my Mac? If so, where should that be?

MotionMan

It depends, in iPhoto preferences, under the advance tab, if you've checked "copy imported photos to you iPhoto library", then all your photos will be copied to the pictures directory on your Mac. If not, nothing will be copied over, and iPhoto will access you pictures from your NAS.

I see that if you do that, aliases are created for each picture. What if in the future the path to your photo storage location changes? Is there an easy way to update all of those aliases?

 

[TheStu]

This actually happened to me recently. I had backed up my iPhoto Library using DropBox, but it ended up moving the iPhoto Library to the DropBox folder instead of copying it.

When I next launch iPhoto, it asked me to point it to the iPhoto Library that it wanted me to use.

 

[mugs]

Originally posted by: TheStu
This actually happened to me recently. I had backed up my iPhoto Library using DropBox, but it ended up moving the iPhoto Library to the DropBox folder instead of copying it.

When I next launch iPhoto, it asked me to point it to the iPhoto Library that it wanted me to use.

If you're responding to me, that doesn't really answer my question.

Right now all of my photos are stored at \\WindowsPC\D\Photos

I imported them into iPhoto, and it created thumbnails in /Macintosh HD/Users/mugs/Pictures/iPhoto Library/Import/Data and it put aliases to the originals in /Macintosh HD/Users/mugs/Pictures/iPhoto Library/Import/Originals (because I unchecked the box that would allow it to copy the originals).

Now, if at some point in the future I want to move my photos to \\WindowsPC\E\Photos, all of those aliases will be pointing to the wrong location. I won't want to re-import the photos, because all of the metadata will be associated with the old files. So how would I update the locations of all 20k+ aliases?

 

[TheStu]

I am not too sure on that, but you could always test by moving a couple of pictures and see how iPhoto responds.

 

[mugs]

OK, the aliases point to:
/Volumes/windowspc-2/Photos/<folder>/<filename>

Is OS X consistent in where it mounts SMB shares, or is it possible that the next time I reboot (possibly after some changes to the Windows PC) //WindowsPC/D will be mounted at /Volumes/windowspc-1 ? Or is it based on the order in which I access the shares during the current login session?

If it consistently mounts shares in the same location, is there a file where it stores the mappings? If so, and if in the future I need to change the location where my photos are stored, maybe I could edit that file to update the mapping so the new SMB share is mounted at /Volumes/windowspc-2 ?

The other option I was considering was writing a script to automatically mount that share in a specific location every time I boot (say ~/Pictures/nas ) and then re-import all of my pictures from that location. That way no matter where I have my pictures stored, and even if I were to migrate to a new Mac, I could just mount the share in that location and use my old library. Is there any downside to doing that? Is Time Machine smart enough to not back up those files, or do I have to explicitly exclude that location?

 

[TheStu]

You are way beyond my knowledge now. Aside from media sharing, I don't do a whole lot of cross OS interoperation.

 

[mugs]

Originally posted by: TheStu
You are way beyond my knowledge now. Aside from media sharing, I don't do a whole lot of cross OS interoperation.

Yeah... I'm beyond my knowledge too. 😛 I went from Mac OS 8 to Windows 98, and just now got back to Mac OS. Along the way I picked up some knowledge of linux and HP-UX, so I'm trying to fill the gaps in my OS X knowledge with my linux/unix knowledge. I never did any kind of sysadmin stuff though, so this stuff is kind of sketchy for me from both angles. Hopefully someone here knows this stuff.

What are some good Mac forums where I could get questions like this answered?