iphoto pissing me off... mebe a Tiger glitch?

[Erendiox]

Ok, so i've been using iphoto a whole bunch. Its worked quite well up until this point. I imported all my photos, organized them, and even threw in a bunch of keywords that I could use to search for specific groups. Now, I have a bunch of nature photos that I want to open up in preview. I jump over to spotlight, type in "nature" (which I so cleverly attached to the relevant photos) and up pop all of my nature pictures. "awesome" I say, glad to see Tiger's indexing goodness workin without a hitch. I open up the search in a seperate window, open up the "images" tab to see all of them, select them all, and open. Much to my dismay, iphoto rears its slow, resource hogging head, and opens each photo. Its verson of opening the photo would be to flash to the edit interface for a second with each photo, as if I had double clicked on a photo in the application, and refuse to stop sifting through all the images I selected until it does every one, even if I quit, it just reopens itself. This kills me because I specifically told my mac to open images in preview so this very thing wouldn't happen. I get info on the images I selected and they all say "open with preview". But when I open any one of them from the spotlight search window, it opens them in iphoto. If I reveal the file in the finder and then open, it opens like it should in preview. This seems like a bug to me. I realize that the spotlight window is a somewhat different entity then the finder (ie. It does not come up with F10 when the finder is selected) but I didn't expect it to override the program defaults for my files. Any thoughts on this?

 

[toneloco2881]

What you are experiencing is one of my many pet peeves with Tiger. It seems that any photos that reside in your actual iPhoto library will supersede your "open with" settings. The least they could have done is add an "open with" option in a contextual menu when i right click. A similarly inane thing is, sometimes I like to preview images with the slideshow option instead of opening an external app. If i want to add it to iPhoto i either have to do it the traditional way or search for it in Spotlight first then add. It seems only files first searched through Spotlight, then enacting the slideshow feature allow you to automatically add to iPhoto. A minor gripe yes, but it seems such an easy enough fix that I wonder what the hell Apple is thinking sometimes?Don't get me started on the lack of a Mail progress bar..... I love Tiger other than these small oversights!

Sorry for the rant, but I thought maybe I was the only one that was perturbed by this.

 

[gekko513]

I think it is because the iPhoto image files don't necessarily look like the edited image you're looking for. If you edit an image in iPhoto it doesn't have to save the changes as a new jpg file, but just save the adjustments separately in the iPhoto metadata. I don't know exactly how iPhoto does it, it's just possible, that's all.

I can't see any easy solutions that will give all benefits at the same time.

Exporting images from iPhoto will give you normal Finder images, but I don't know if the metadata follows.

 

[Arnaud]

I'm not so sure about the meta-data file.

I'm not home on my computer to check whether I'm right, but I think I saw the way iPhoto works in its archives' directories: directories by dates, and then a subdirectory for the original files which have been modified.

What I mean is : 2 full files for a modified picture - the result of the modifications and the original one. Advantage is that the software doesn't need to re-apply all the transformations (rotations, corrections etc...) every time you open the picture. Disadvantage is that it needs 3 seconds to re-save my 8 MPixel pictures whenever I just rotate them.

For the connection with Spotlight, I haven't tried either. Can't you drag them over to the icon of preview? Ok, not as smooth as simply clicking on them I suppose...

A.

 

[gekko513]

What happens if you drag the selected images from the spotlight window to the Preview icon in the dock? (I'm not on a Mac right now, so I can't check it for myself.)

 

[toneloco2881]

Hhmm. Good tip on dragging the image to the Preview icon. iPhoto images when dragged to the icon do in-fact open in preview. I don't normally keep Preview in my dock, but might now just for this purpose. Im still relatively new to the Apple world, and learn new things all the time.

Thanks!

 

[Applespider]

I've created a useful little Automator action for when I want to find a few photos that I know are in iPhoto without opening it up.

It's a Finder plug-in so that I can just 'Control Click' and get it up and it's really fast!

If you want to recreate it, it's as follows

iPhoto Action - Ask for iPhoto items
Finder Action - Copy to Desktop (check Options to specify a location each time)

You could make a 'Open in Preview' action rather than the Finder one or following the Finder one.

When you run it, it throws up a dialogue box with your iPhoto Library/Albums in it and a Spotlight bar for you to search for your images. It's much faster than launching iPhoto. You choose your images and click on 'Choose' and then it either copies them or opens them or archives them - whatever you've chosen.

 

[Erendiox]

Hey. Thx for all the info guys. It's unfortunate iphoto works like that. I actually tried making a workflow to get around it. I tried the ask for iphoto items and open in preview. It looked like it should have worked fine for me, but the little spotlight bar at the bottom does not search through the spotlight comments of the photos! Eh, no big deal I guess. I'll find a way around it im sure, but add this to my Tiger complaint list.