Why Isn't iPhoto's Photo Library Organized Like iTunes Music Library in Finder?

[GodBless]

After 2.5 years of OS X I still don't understand why my music is sorted by Album and my pictures are sorted by date. I want my pictures to be sorted by album in Finder so I have success finding my pictures without opening iPhoto.

Does anyone have any solutions? 3rd party software maybe?

In advance thanks for your help.

 

[decksnap]

Please write Apple. It's the only way this will change. It boggles my mind also.

 

[mcmillan]

Because you're talking in different terms. In iPhoto, an album is more like a playlist. And what is an album in iTunes is more like a roll in iPhoto. Remember that playlists (in iTunes) are just a list of songs, when you play a song from the playlist, iTunes locates it in the Library and plays it. So in iPhoto, when you click a pic in an album, it will locate it in the library an open it.

iPhoto's album is not the same as iTunes' album.

 

[Linkjeniero]

Exactly, and remember that the same photo can be in many albums, or none at all... so it would be a crappy way to store them. To find your pictures easily without opening iPhoto, use Spotlight (or LaunchBar if you don't have Tiger)

 

[Inspector Lee]

Exactly, and remember that the same photo can be in many albums, or none at all... so it would be a crappy way to store them. To find your pictures easily without opening iPhoto, use Spotlight (or LaunchBar if you don't have Tiger)

You can use albums and you can also use keyword assistant for organization of your photos. If you want to do something with a photo like photoshop, just drag the photo to your desktop (thus creating a copy) and open it from there if it is not stored in an album.

There is a lot of debate concerning the hierarchical storage in iPhoto. I find the current setup easy to deal with. I simply don't mess with the hierarchy and do all retrieval from within the app.

 

[wordmunger]

If you want your photos organized this way, you don't need iPhoto. Just use preview to view them, and organize them in folders the way you want. If you drag a whole bunch of photos into Preview, you can view them in slideshow format, just like in iPhoto.

 

[GodBless]

Because you're talking in different terms. In iPhoto, an album is more like a playlist. And what is an album in iTunes is more like a roll in iPhoto. Remember that playlists (in iTunes) are just a list of songs, when you play a song from the playlist, iTunes locates it in the Library and plays it. So in iPhoto, when you click a pic in an album, it will locate it in the library an open it.

iPhoto's album is not the same as iTunes' album.

I understand these differences but there is always a solution to a problem. The least Apple could do is give you a list of smart folders that each have the title of each album in your iPhoto library. This way you wouldn't have to deal with aliases like older versions of iPhoto do when they sort pictures by albums in Finder. I would like this approach a lot better.

Also if you notice the old versions of iPhoto have extra "Data" files that get in the way of browsing pictures. If they got rid of these files and didn't give you aliases I would be happy.

 

[besler3035]

Keep in mind that some people might not put ALL of their pictures in an album, because it's the only photo of that sort. I have a few of these cases on my iPhoto, and I like how they're organized. The only thing I wish they would do is if I changed the date of a picture, I wish they would delete that folder so I don't have to manually.

 

[wordmunger]

I understand the differences but the least Apple could do is give you aliases to each picture in each album and organize them just like iTunes does. I would like this approach a lot better.

You're just asking iPhoto to do something it wasn't designed for. When you use iPhoto, the point is for it to be your photo organizer instead of the finder. You can easily find and export from iPhoto, so why do it any other way?

What I wish is that I could export music from iTunes as easily as I can export photos from iPhoto. For example, I wish I could sync my shuffle over the network. That's never going to happen, for copyright reasons. But I can get photos over the network very easily.

 

[GodBless]

You're just asking iPhoto to do something it wasn't designed for. When you use iPhoto, the point is for it to be your photo organizer instead of the finder. You can easily find and export from iPhoto, so why do it any other way?

I changed my mind fast and edited my above post. So it is different then what you responded to.

In response to you now, I like to do things through iPhoto if I am doing lots of things with my pictures. If iPhoto isn't open though and all I need is to get a picture it would be easier and faster to get the picture in Finder since iPhoto takes so long to open. So there would be a good advantage to my request.

 

[Applespider]

I want my pictures to be sorted by album in Finder so I have success finding my pictures without opening iPhoto.

You can create a Finder Plug-in in Automator that Asks for iPhoto images and then copies them to the desktop without having to open iPhoto (notice it's closed in the screenshot)

It brings up a list of your Library/Last Roll/Albums to scroll through and then you just select the images and they copy to the desktop or a specified folder. You can create a similar action for getting files out of iTunes.

Oh yeah, and Spotlight works within the plug-in so it's easy to find things (it doesn't seem to find the keywords or comments from iPhoto tho)

 

[GodBless]

You can create a Finder Plug-in in Automator that Asks for iPhoto images and then copies them to the desktop without having to open iPhoto (notice it's closed in the screenshot)

It brings up a list of your Library/Last Roll/Albums to scroll through and then you just select the images and they copy to the desktop or a specified folder. You can create a similar action for getting files out of iTunes.

Oh yeah, and Spotlight works within the plug-in so it's easy to find things (it doesn't seem to find the keywords or comments from iPhoto tho)

That's really cool! Thanks for telling me about it. I guess I'll use this method for now and hope that iLife '06 will support proper file sorting of albums for iPhoto as it does for iTunes albums.

 

[decksnap]

You're just asking iPhoto to do something it wasn't designed for. When you use iPhoto, the point is for it to be your photo organizer instead of the finder. You can easily find and export from iPhoto, so why do it any other way?

I disagree. iTunes is there to be your organizer also, yet unlike iPhoto you can easily rename source files and keep them nice and organized so as to be navigable in the finder.

Also, photos get used for different things than audio files.. I could argue that people have many more uses and destinations/goals for their photos than they do their audio. Access through the finder is pretty necessary for a lot of people, and seems like it is more important in iPhoto than iTunes.

(How many threads have I posted this in??) My number one problem is you can't rename file names. Hand in hand with the lack of usable finder organization.