“Take Control of Your Digital Photos,” Chapter 6
A previous chapter talked a lot about adding metadata during the import process because that’s the easiest way to apply it. Assigning keywords and other information during that initial stage takes some prep time, but when you click the Import button, the metadata is applied with a broad brush across all your incoming photos. After import, though, you still have some touch-up work to do. To make your photos easily searchable later — the ultimate goal in our organization project — you also need to apply more-specific metadata to individual photos. This might include identifying people and landmarks, or describing shots. In this chapter, I look at how to choose good keywords and how to apply them smartly. I also discuss how to fix incorrect dates and times, how to apply geolocation information, and why it may not be worth investing the time in your program’s facial-recognition tools.
I don't know if the book will cover it since I have not read it all yet, obviously, but it would be nice to have an app that can make good thumbnail images in bulk. Many images import without them. If you know of one, put it in the book. Or maybe I missed it in an earlier chapter since I tend to speed read e-books.
I think the question is, what do you want the thumbnails for? It doesn't seem directly related to managing your digital photo collection, and each photo-management app creates its own thumbnails for internal use.
I have old photos with no thumbnails. I usually sort them into folders based on content or use, sometimes duplicating the photo in different folders, like the wallpaper folder. I use the thumbnails in the finder window to find the one I want.
As Adam mentioned, when you bring your old photos into a photo-management program, it will create thumbnails for you.
It sounds like you're organizing solely in the Finder, which I don't cover in this book. You can choose View > Show View Options and select the checkbox labeled "Show icon preview" to see thumbnails.
That did it, thanks. A lot of the photos are not worth putting in a management system. They are just there for wallpaper, which is my most frequent use for photos.
I am currently using iPhoto and will likely move to Lightroom or Aperture. Will my iPhoto metadata move easily? are you going to discuss moving from iPhoto to other apps?
Moving from iPhoto to Aperture is easy, because the two applications share the same library format. So, shifting is just a matter of opening your iPhoto library in Aperture.
Moving to Lightroom is another matter. And that's largely because you can't get a lot of information out of iPhoto. As I mentioned in Chapter 3, it's possible to export photos and get some metadata, but ratings, for example, don't transfer.
(Well, one option is to move to Aperture, and then move from Aperture to Lightroom. But that's an expensive converter.)
One workaround (which I haven't yet tried; I'm typing off the top of my head right now) would be to use text in place of ratings for the purpose of exporting. For example, do a search in iPhoto for all 4-star photos, and then Batch Change to append something like "fourstar" to the Description field. Unfortunately, you can't include keywords in a Batch Change operation, because that would be sensible.
When you import the images into Lightroom, you'd do a search for "fourstar" and then use Sync Metadata to tag those photos with a 4-star rating.
It's not that easy, of course. That workaround would work with JPEG images, because iPhoto writes the metadata to the file. The metadata does *not* travel with raw images, and there doesn't seem to be a way to create XMP sidecar files. So another solution, a real ugly workaround, could be to export the four-star images to a temporary "four star" folder in the Finder; import those into Lightroom; and then sync the ratings to the imported batch. But then that only solves the rating problem; other metadata like keywords just evaporate.
There were some utilities that would vacuum metadata from iPhoto and enable a smooth transition, but the library database change (to match Aperture's library format) broke them all.
Sheesh, I think I just wrote an article. Or an appendix. :-) If there's enough interest, I'll think about adding this info to one of the chapters or writing a new one.
I think transition information would be extremely valuable, since everyone is likely using something already, and if they've determined from the book that what they're using is not ideal, they'll want to switch.
I agree with Adam. I've pretty much decided to move from iPhoto to Aperture but the similarities are just different enough that I'm not sure I understand all the nuances yet. Any guidance on "gotchas" would be useful. I can appreciate that a switch to anything else would be quite a bit more difficult - especially if a large library was involved.
I agree absolutely with Adam and David, it is probably all about transition for most of us. Like many og you I have thousands of photos that ought to be managed, probably by something more powerful than iPhoto
I agree too, I am trying to work out which photo manager to use, and then I will be moving 20000 photos.