Apple really sucks sometimes

[falter]

Mini rant.

So I'm trying to help a friend - she is a loyal Mac user (sigh) and has zillions of photos backed up over years, mostly in iphoto, that she wants consolidated and copied onto a new NAS drive. I hate both Apple and iPhoto. Another friend had a saying: Apple makes the difficult easy and the easy difficult. If this were a PC, all I'd have to do is copy JPGs from the various folders and that'd be it. She'd be able to do that herself. But not iPhoto. Oh no, Apple has to import everything into their proprietary database format. And then over the years they take away iphoto and bring it back and then take it away again, driving everyone nuts and leading to database compatiblity problems. The newer Photos app won't import some of the iphoto databases. Iphoto won't touch them either - they're maddeningly greyed out when you try any form of importation. Why a programmer can make it do that but not make it explain why is beyond me. One database at least asks for the iphoto upgrader, but the upgrader won't upgrade the database because..... it's greyed out. iphoto won't open or import it without upgrading, and the upgrader won't open it at all. Nice.

Yeah, this is why I kicked Apple to the curb years ago. I'd love to put a leather boot to Microsoft also, but for the moment I don't really have that option. But at least they don't have iPhoto/Photos/Whatever else Apple's ADHD comes up with next.

 

[bear]

All the JPEGs are still there in the filesystem. I don't understand what the problem is.

 

[falter]

For some reason itndoesn't let me open the iphoto pkg. Ive tried on two Macs. It'd be a lot easier if they just kept the photos in the Pictures directory or something. Plus it's a lot easier to export the whole wad using the iphoto exporter, when it works, than wading through that.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

All the JPEGs are still there in the filesystem. I don't understand what the problem is.

If you've actually bothered sorting and labeling and whatnot things it sort of sucks to lose all that metadata. But, well, this isn't uniquely a problem with Apple; if you picked some random photo organizer software for any other OS that ended being abandoned by the maker you'd be in the same boat. (And, seriously, the photos *are* there on the filesystem, poke around in "~/Pictures/iPhoto Library.photolibrary" directory.

About a month ago I went through a brief bout of "W-T-Fudge, Apple?!" myself when the SSD on the MacBook I was lazily using iMovie on to edit Youtube videos on filled up. To keep it short and sweet, iMovie is built *strictly* around this "I built a little picket fence around this spot and this is where all your projects live" philosophy and so far as I could figure out it *kinda* made it hard to migrate stuff in and out of that, either to directly plugged-in storage or, especially, a network drive. Big PITA.

(The situation ended up annoying me enough I ended up installing three different video editors on the Windows machine with the bigger drive I do most other things on and after some poking settled on DaVinci Resolve as the one to keep banging my head against. The learning curve is actually pretty low, all things considered, probably should have ditched iMovie for a big-boy-pants program years ago. It's not that I actually *liked* iMovie, really, it was just a matter of it being there.)

 

[bladamson]

I'm still mad that Jobs did in the Apple II for political reasons.

But I still had a powermac 8500 back in the day. Had a G3 card in it and a bunch of RAM. Made a really great Linux workstation. But it was getting a little old, so I went to the Apple dealer (this was right after the Intel Macs had come out) and tried to get them to order me one of those dual G4 sawtooth CPU cards. So they laughed at me and tried to sell me an Intel Mac instead. So I said, "Well, I'm going to run Linux on it anyway, so if it's gonna be an Intel box then I guess I'll just go buy a PC and you fancy boys can kiss my a--."

I haven't looked back. >_>

 

[Jove]

All I can picture is Ron Swanson strolling into the Genius bar and telling them to take their new fangled mind control box and stick it somewhere.

If you don't get the joke, check out Lee's YouTube channel. It's much different than the prim and proper nerd personas on some of the Retro Computing channels. No offense to those guys, I watch them all, but Lee has a sense of humor and voice quite different from many presenters, and very similar to a famous TV character.

 

[bladamson]

Aw shucks!

 

[falter]

I can attest I enjoy Lee's channel also.

 

[whartung]

iPhoto has been pretty much dead for about 5 years. During the upgrade process, the photos are imported from the iPhoto libraries to be compatible with the new program, Photos.

Both systems use SQLite for the storage of meta-data. SQLite has been around for ages, and there's a multitude of programs that can access this data. While the internal schema is "proprietary", the format is not. SQLite is an open book, it's just not human readable without tools.

Photos (I don't know the specifics about iPhoto) relies on a photo library, which is a directory combining the meta-data with the images. It has a default "System" library. You can change the default library by launching Photos with the Option key held down.

You can copy a iPhoto library from one drive to another, and then set it up as the default library (using the technique above).

If you have other photo files not formally part of a library, you should import them using the Photos program.

I can't speak to why the conversion from iPhotos to Photos may have failed, but if folks have been moving files in and out of the directories by hand (i.e. not through the Photo program itself), the no doubt there will be trouble.

There are also utilities available to help clean up things like duplicate pictures and the like.