iPhoto's over-zealous "delete duplicates" function

[Annalea]

Hi there,

So, a couple imports ago, I foolishly said yes when iPhoto asked me if I wanted it to automatically delete duplicates. I thought (wrongly) that iPhoto would only delete photos with identical filenames . . . when in reality iPhoto is not importing (or deleting after import) SIMILAR photos. GAURGH!

I'm the type of photographer (term used loosely!) that takes multiple nearly identical shots, then chooses one of them and deletes the rest. With headshots this is super-important, because small differences in expression either make or break the shot. Photo stream just picks one at random, and leaves the others on my phone. I took some photos of an activity my daughter went to last week, and only one of the two photos taken in a garden showed up . . . a photo of a recipe I wanted to save shows on my phone, but not in iPhoto.

When I connected my iPhone to my imac and did an import, I got only the photos that myseteriously hadn't come across in photo stream. So when I look at my last import, I see seven or so shots, and none of the rest of the ones I took right along with them. The rest are in the photo stream. And when I look at the Last 12 Months view, I see none of these photos at all. (It halts at a point more than two weeks ago.)

I'm utterly stumped. I'm about to abandon iPhoto completely, because while it has some nifty features, it has continued to mystify and annoy me. I can't find anywhere to tell it to knock it off with the AHEMintelligentAHEM duplicate interference, and this is all growing really, really old.

So, if anyone can make heads of tails of what I just wrote (since I don't really understand what's going on--yet another big strike against iPhoto--I don't appreciate software that's this difficult to fathom, and I'm not what you would call a techno-novice), please let me know if I should give up now, or try to figure this out a little longer.

Many thanks . . .

ETA: OSX 10.7.5, iPhoto 11 (9.3.2), iPhone running iOS 5.1.1 (not ready to give up Google Maps ;o)

 

[roadbloc]

Try Aperture. It is similar to iPhoto, but more flexible and some cool pro tools thrown in.

 

[mtsmith2]

In iPhoto Preferences, Make sure the Photo Stream settings are the same as the image shown. My iPhoto Photo Stream includes all images that I have taken (even if I have taken 20 of the same shot). I'm using Mountain Lion

 

[Annalea]

The settings are all correct, as far as the photo stream goes. Thanks, though.

I just remember a iPhoto throwing up a dialog, I told it to ignore duplicates, and now it's all weird. I used to use Picasa, but I thought I'd give iPhoto and the photo stream a try. So far it's klunky, since it doesn't update unless iPhoto's open, and sometimes it refuses to work unless the phone needs to be connected to the imac. I thought the whole point was I could take a picture on my iphone, and it would automagically appear on my mac within a few minutes, without me doing anything else. Isn't that how it's supposed to work?

If I can't figure this out, I'll probably go back to Picasa, since I understand more of it. It's still not as user-friendly as I like, but I haven't ever had trouble importing to it.