Easiest way to clear up historical iPhoto chaos?

[mr1970]

So...I've got myself into a bit of a mess.

I've had a fair number of macs over the years and, until Time Machine came along, had a variety of paranoia-based backup strategies.

I moved to a Mac Pro about 6 months ago and now everything is at least in one place - however...

The very, very long and short of it is that I now have 344 iPhoto libraries. Some of them will be are a fair size but some appear to be claiming to be 20 bytes, which is clearly nonsense.

I bought Aperture as I figured that would be the easiest way to merge libraries, and have dealt with the two or three biggest libraries. The problems I have now, however, are:

- The Aperture library is now >100GB and I absolutely don't have that many photos - I'd guess my entire library might be 10k photos
- I'd like to do a sweep of the data drive for "loose" image files but as many of them will have similar names I'm wondering what the easiest way to move them into one place would be. Ideally I want to move them all into one folder from where I can add them to aperture.

Anyone had the same sort of problem? The obvious, painful answer is just hack my way through one folder at a time but there must be an easier way...?

 

[swordio777]

- The Aperture library is now >100GB and I absolutely don't have that many photos - I'd guess my entire library might be 10k photos

Sounds like aperture is generating high quality previews. Do you shoot raw of jpeg? If you shoot raw, aperture will create a jpeg preview by default every time you import new files - you can change the size of this preview in preferences, or even turn it off if you prefer.

- I'd like to do a sweep of the data drive for "loose" image files but as many of them will have similar names I'm wondering what the easiest way to move them into one place would be. Ideally I want to move them all into one folder from where I can add them to aperture.

1) Move absolutely all the images you know about on to a dedicated external HDD.
2) Then unplug it & do a spotlight/finder search for the various file types you use: jpg, nef, cr2, etc. This will highlight any images that you haven't moved onto the external drive yet
3) move them all into a specific location on your internal drive
4) and finally move those onto the external drive too.

Now ALL your images are on that external drive. You can import them to aperture and then use aperture to relocate them if needed.

Hope that helps.

 

[Razeus]

So...I've got myself into a bit of a mess.

I've had a fair number of macs over the years and, until Time Machine came along, had a variety of paranoia-based backup strategies.

I moved to a Mac Pro about 6 months ago and now everything is at least in one place - however...

The very, very long and short of it is that I now have 344 iPhoto libraries. Some of them will be are a fair size but some appear to be claiming to be 20 bytes, which is clearly nonsense.

I bought Aperture as I figured that would be the easiest way to merge libraries, and have dealt with the two or three biggest libraries. The problems I have now, however, are:

- The Aperture library is now >100GB and I absolutely don't have that many photos - I'd guess my entire library might be 10k photos
- I'd like to do a sweep of the data drive for "loose" image files but as many of them will have similar names I'm wondering what the easiest way to move them into one place would be. Ideally I want to move them all into one folder from where I can add them to aperture.

Anyone had the same sort of problem? The obvious, painful answer is just hack my way through one folder at a time but there must be an easier way...?

http://www.fatcatsoftware.com/iplm/