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20050711 Monday July 11, 2005

What's the best way to synch iPhoto Libraries? Having two 17" PowerBooks around the house has led to a problem. We've accidentally imported our photos onto both machines, and now we don't have a true master that contains all our pictures. To rectify the problem, I tried using rsync to update my ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library directory with the one from the 2nd machine. All the pictures were migrated successfully, but not the photo albums, nor the thumbnails in iPhoto. I even tried importing the new pictures, but it says the file is not a valid image (even though I can open it in Preview just fine). Any ideas for a better synchronization strategy? Posted in Mac OS X at Jul 11 2005, 06:02:50 AM MDT 6 Comments

Comments:

I am about to embark upon the same problem. You may have to resort to JDBC coding to get this to work. The albums are stored in Microsoft Access format in <user>/Local Settings/Adobe/Photoshop Album/... I'm at work and don't have the exact path. But it looks like merging multiple albums, especially in a sync mode, is going to be a bit more work than rsync can handle.

Posted by Jim Cook on July 11, 2005 at 11:30 AM MDT #

[Jim Cook] wow, you get an award for failure to read the original post. I don't see anywhere that Matt mentions Adobe. Macs also don't have a "Local Settings" folder.

Matt, you might try rsync again using the -E flag (requires Tiger). That tells rsync to copy the resource forks of the files, which could be why the albums, etc. are getting corrupted. Worth a shot. You might also try a dedicated Mac sync application such as ChronoSync (http://www.econtechnologies.com), which I use for keeping my ~/Documents and ~/Code directories in sync between my G5 and powerbook.

Posted by Brian on July 11, 2005 at 12:31 PM MDT #

I ended up using iPhoto Library Manager to <em>merge</em> my two libraries. It didn't retain some of the albums, but I think I got all the pictures. The only pain was I had to ignore duplicates every time a new import occurred - so I can do click a button about 50 times during the process.

Posted by Matt Raible on July 12, 2005 at 11:42 PM MDT #

A solution to all of your problems- get rid of Apple computers! HAHAHA I use Yahoo! pictures for my photo storage. Matt told me a site he likes (can't remember) but I would be interested in hearing what others use for us non- Apple users. Reagrds

Posted by Justin Blue on July 13, 2005 at 04:02 PM MDT #

Hey Justin, why even go there? You're a dope. Everyone else, Flickr is a great way to store/manage your photos. Mac, *nix, or PC (bleh.)

Posted by NotJustinBlue on July 17, 2005 at 09:48 PM MDT #

http://www.smugmug.com/ - SmugMug is supposed to be good... I am going to give it a try.

Posted by Don Laur on August 08, 2005 at 01:36 PM MDT #

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Matt Raible is the Lead UI Architect at LinkedIn. The opinions on this site are mine, not my employers.
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