A good time to reconstruct my iPhoto library?

[kepardue]

I have tons of pictures in a fairly large iPhoto library. This is the same iPhoto library that originated from probably 2005 or so, and has been upgraded over the years with the various versions of iPhoto that have brought Events, Faces, Places, and so on. I just did a fresh reinstall of Mountain Lion, and am liking the 'new start' approach. All my media is in its appropriate place in iTunes rather than being spread across the different ways that Apple has changed it over the years, and so on.

I'm wondering if I should re-import all of my photos into iPhoto and get a fresh start there, as well? I've had occasional problems over the years, especially with me having tagged faces and those tags somehow going missing. The library itself seems to be in a different format. It's called "iPhoto Library" of course, but when I copied and pasted it from my external hard drive, it didn't ask to replace the brand-new, no pictures 'iPhoto Library.' It's actually putting a second iPhoto Library file in there.

Long story short, what do you think? Time to reimport all my photos? I know the biggest issue is that I'd have to re-tag them all with faces, but if that gives me a more stable library it may be worth it.

 

[Jessica Lares]

Long story short, what do you think? Time to reimport all my photos? I know the biggest issue is that I'd have to re-tag them all with faces, but if that gives me a more stable library it may be worth it.

Do it! It'll make your life so much easier, especially with any upcoming iLife updates that could happen in the near future.

 

[kirky29]

Yeah, I'd say do it too, it'll make it easier for you in the future.
Maybe only do a few at a time, it can be quite painful doing it all at once.

How do you organise them?

I just have two categories, one for iPhone and the other for my digital stuff, then arrange them by year > month.

I keep two projects at the top for editing.

Then just search for rated and tagged photos.

I used to do the same when I used iPhoto.

 

[robgendreau]

Just to be clear: you have a functional iPhoto Library, and have presumably edited photos, renamed them, added faces, etc. Now you want to import the photos and lose all that?

If your collection of photos is piddly small, and you haven't done much of anything with them, I suppose this wouldn't result in many problems. But you should make sure you are prepared to lose all the changes you've made.

Have you trying rebuilding the library? Start iPhoto up with cmd-option and you have several options to repair and maintain that library.

And perhaps it's time to move to Aperture. It lets you split up libraries, export photos and then merge them back into the original library. So that all the changes are merged back intact. Gives you much more control over management and changes than iPhoto.

Rob