I’ve been sitting here organizing my photos in iPhoto. Now I am annoyed.
knew that iPhoto saved modified versions of files I modified within iPhoto into a new folder and also kept the original as well (in case I wanted to revert back). Since iPhoto doesn’t meet all my image modifying needs, I got Photoshop Elements (older version) and started opening photos from within iPhoto in this external editor to size and crop them for posting or emailing without saving them back to iPhoto. I thought this would stop iPhoto from making a copy of it in the Modified Folder. I just discovered it doesn’t. As soon as I open a photo in the external editor from iPhoto, it copies it to the Modified Folder, no matter if I later save the modified version or not. So now I have duplicates of a bunch of photos sitting on my hard drive taking up space. This displeases me.
My intention was to have iPhoto be the place I kept all my original photos, without any corrections, resizing or rotation, and I certainly don’t need two copies of the same photo in two different folders, nor do I want to save the modifications I make (making them smaller) for use on the web. I just want iPhoto to store my originals and use it to organize them.
My first thought was to just open them from Elements without bothering with iPhoto. That works great for when I want to make a small version to send to someone or post here, and I guess that’s what I’ll do in those cases. But … I’d also like to rotate all my originals properly, without doing anything else to them. I don’t want copies of all of them in two places on my hard drive, one rotated and one not. My thought was to open them in Elements, change the original, and save it back into the iPhoto library. Works great, except for one thing … the thumbnail of the photo in iPhoto shows the old, non-rotated version.
So, some questions for my iPhoto/Mac using buddies out there:
1. Is there no way to stop iPhoto from making duplicates when I use an external editor and don’t save my changes?
2. Is there any way to update the thumbnails to show the actual image I have in my iPhoto library (after I have edited it without messing with iPhoto and saved over the original)? How to rebuild either the database or thumbnails in iPhoto. I don’t know what the options mean … small thumbnails or all thumbnails, so I did one first, it made no difference. I did both the next time, and that fixed the problem.
3. How the hell do I get rid of all the duplicates that already exist and regain my lost hard drive space?
4. Should I just give up on iPhoto and try something else? What else is there to try (as in free)?
In an ideal world, I would be able to browse my iPhoto library folders with Elements, make whatever changes I like to the images within, save them over the originals, and have the changes show in the thumbnails in iPhoto. Actually, in an ideal world, iPhoto wouldn’t make copies of every damn photo and save both versions, but apparently, this isn’t an ideal world.
I have to go feed the husband. Then more Google research to see if I can answer any of my own questions. I hadn’t had any luck yet, which is why I decided to toss this out there.
Hello! I have the same exact problem, I don’t want the same photo twice just because I rotated it. I’m looking for a fix for this problem. I use to use Adobe Photoshop Elements to organize my photos in WinXP, but I’m a switcher for a month now and I can’t find a way to organize my photos like I use to do in Windows.
I have found a program or two that will “clean up” your library and get rid of the copies (or the originals), but you’d have to do it all the time to keep it that way. They make me nervous too. What if the program screwed up and deleted something I didn’t want deleted, you know? I’d rather the program have the option to not save both copies of the photo, and it’s silly that it doesn’t.
I’m still reading and looking around trying to find a solution that works for me. So far what I have been doing is pulling the ones I want to work on out of iPhoto and into a folder on my desktop, doing whatever I want to them with PSE, reimporting them to iPhoto, and then deleting the older version from within iPhoto (unless it’s one I still want to keep the raw copy of). That’s a lot of extra steps, but at least my hard drive space isn’t getting eaten up.
What really, REALLY annoys me is how iPhoto saves a copy of the photo I have opened with PSE from within iPhoto (edit with external editor), even if I don’t save it. A lot of times I just want to quickly open a file to resize for email or posting here and have no intention at all of saving it forever. Yet iPhoto insists of making an exact duplicate of the opened file in the Modified folder … with no modifications, since I didn’t save it there. It’s a little crazy.
Still, I’m loving my Mac. I just have to find a way to do exactly what I want to do with my photos.