Tag Archives: iphoto

Adobe Provides iPhoto Import for Lightroom

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Screen Shot 2014-11-20 at 5.37.37 PMWhen Apple announced earlier this year that it would discontinue aperture and come out with its own new application called Photos for the Mac, many people didn’t know what the future of iPhoto was. But since then Apple has indicated that iPhoto’s future is limited.  So while we wait for the new photos application, it makes good sense to look at other options for dealing with our large photo collections after iPhoto’s demise.

The primary photo organization application on the market is Adobe’s Lightroom. Lightroom is an excellent application for organizing photos, and remains my choice for photo management for for advanced photo users.. But iPhoto was definitely easier to use and provided operating system integration for Mac users that was second to none. While we wait and see what the new Photos app brings, Adobe has moved forward and provided an ability for us to import iPhoto libraries into their Lightroom product. The truly amazing thing is that Adobe’s importer not only imports photos but also much of the organization that we used inside iPhoto.

In the latest update to Lightroom, Version 5.7, Adobe included it’s own custom plug-in designed to import as much as possible from your Aperture catalog into Lightroom. Adobe’s tool will retain all of the following metadata:

  • Flags
  • Star Ratings
  • Keywords
  • GPS Data
  • Faces (face naming tags are mapped to keywords)
  • Rejects (files designated as Rejects in Aperture will be imported into Collections >
  • Photos Hidden in iPhoto)
  • iPhoto events/folders/albums will be mapped as closely as possible into Lightroom collection sets and collections

​A few things are lost in the transition, but they’re quite understandable:

  • Image adjustments
  • Smart Albums
  • Face Tag Region of Interest (face naming tags are mapped to keywords)
  • Color Labels (other than optionally as keywords)
  • Any kind of creation (books, web galleries, etc) other than the collections that correspond to them

I am boarded all 26,000 photos for my iPhoto library and the importer did a terrific job. I was quite impressed with its ability to be able to organize things in similar fashion to what I used in iPhoto.

Apple’s new photos app may be absolutely amazing, and certainly should have the ability to import iPhoto libraries, but until we see what Apple comes around with this certainly is an option for folks that want to move forward particularly if they want to get into more advanced photo organization and editing.

Organize iPhoto with Keywords

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It’s easy to forget where you put a photo. Even an iPhoto it’s sometimes hard to go back to the photo you’re thinking about without a little help. IPhoto, like most other photograph applications allows the use of keywords to help you find and organize your photographs. Most people believe that they’ll be able to go back and remember when the photo was taken for the subject of the photo and find it in their library but in truth without some additional help such as the keyword it can be very difficult.

IPhoto makes the use of keywords barely easy. The best way to work with keywords is toScreen Shot 2014-05-15 at 4.35.41 PM first go to the view menu and select Info to turn on the iPhoto sidebar.  The sidebar in iPhoto shows you information about the photograph you took, allows you to change the filename, and description, identify faces, and add keywords. Once you click into the keyword field and begin to type the keyword, the work will be completed if it is already in your keyword list. If it’s not in your keyword list it will add a keyword.

IPhoto also allows you to select a group of photos and apply keywords to them to. First select a group of photos you want to add keywords to and then enter the keyword. That keyword or series of keywords Will be applied to all the photos selected.

To edit the keywords you’ve used, go to Window > Manage My Keywords. From the resulting pop-up window, you’ll see a list of your keywords. You can drag keywords into the Quick Group field, which assigns a letter to a keyword, letting you add it with a single keystroke. Click the Edit Keywords button, and you can add or remove keywords, rename them, and assign a letter for a shortcut.

If you want to learn more about keywords and using them in iPhoto Apple provides a support document that covers this.

Screen Shot 2014-05-15 at 4.36.16 PMThe key to making good use of keywords just use the same word each time. This way if you’re looking for photos of birds you can search for the keyword “birds” and find all of the photos that you’ve assigned that keyword to. It’s simple to find any keyword by using the search box in the lower left corner of the iPhoto dialogue. Simply begin to type the keyword you’re looking for and it will show you the photos that you’ve assigned that word too.

The real key to making good use of your photographs is to be able to find them and iPhoto provides Easy-to-use keyword functionality to do just that.