iPhoto 08 to Lightroom

[Larky]

Hello everyone.

Advanced warning: I've been drinking gin for a few hours, so may be wobbly with my typing.

I am moving lock stock over to Lightroom. I kept on with iPhoto because of the events, I love using events in iPhoto. However, now it's starting to clog and slow down, and I'm losing out. Also, it's not as quick to export to Photoshop, alter, save back to LR etc.

But, I have a big, nicely laid out library of events. Is there a way to get LR to read my iPhoto Library and bring the piccies in in a similar way?

Also, how do you lot organise your shoots in LR? Do you make quick collections for each shoot, or use Meta? I'd be interested to know.

Take care.

A.

 

[jlw]

Lightroom won't import your iPhoto structure directly. But depending on how you've organized your iPhoto library, you may be able to come close to replicating it.

To do this, you'd tell Lightroom to "Import Photos from Disk" and then navigate to your Originals folder, which will be inside your iPhoto Library folder. The Originals folder should have a folder structure inside it that mirrors your iPhoto organization scheme.

Tell Lightroom to import the entire Originals folder, using the "Import Files at their Current Location" option. This will create a folder named Originals in the LR Folders pane, and under it will be a subfolder for each folder in your iPhoto Originals folder.

Of course you'll lose your cropping and adjustment data, but presumably one reason you want to switch to Lightroom is so that you can do that nondestructively anyway. The EXIF data for your individual photos should tranfer into LR with no problems, since you're not actually changing anything about the files in the Originals folder.

As to how I organize my shots, my photography is usually event-driven rather than continuous -- in other words, I go to event "X" or activity "Y" and come back with a bunch of pictures that I want to keep grouped together.

So for me, the easiest way to do it is to use a structure of folders and subfolders: I have a folder for each year's worth of pictures, and inside it a folder for each event or activity I photographed, named in chronological order. (The first pictures I took this year went into the 2008 folder, inside a subfolder named "08-01-01 Some Event", and the next batch this month will be in a subfolder named "08-01-02 Another Event" and so on.)

Once I've put the image files into the folder, I import them into Lightroom using the same "Import Files at their Current Location" option I recommended to you above. This leaves the file structure alone, and catalogs the pictures into Lightroom mirroring the same structure.

I add a keyword or two (such as the event name) to each batch of photos as I import them; you can type the keyword into a box in LR's Import dialog so you don't have to enter it for every image individually. The main reason for this is to simplify searching, which otherwise gets difficult once you have 10,000 photos or so in LR.

But for organizing, I mostly use the flag, star-rating, and color-label tools to separate good photos from mediocre ones and group related photos together.

I'll build collections for photo topics that span multiple events -- for example, every time I have a good photo of Jane Doe, I'll add it to the Jane Doe collection.

Does this make any sense? Even after the gin has worn off?

 

[Larky]

Hello. Yep, that makes perfect sense and is how I am now sorting my pictures. I reckon it'll take me a day or two but already I can see the speed difference.

Plus, shoving it into Photoshop then saving that back in LR is a dream.

Ta, A.

 

[Photon42]

Hello Larky,

as you mention PS and LR - with Leopard, the Finder currently crashes when previewing images with saved XMP data from LR. This is not really a show stopper - you can disable the preview column, and of course, the Finder restarts again. It's nasty, though.

If you look in the log files (system.log), you find it is a problem in the XMP handling of Apple's image library. AFAIR Preview does not open the image as well (but has a better exception handling). I'm of course expecting a defect fix from Apple, but the bug is around since Leo came out.

See here, if you like:

http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2007/11/lightroom_13_and_leopard.html

Maybe I'd have some gin, too -- to improve my english 😀

Regards
Ivo