Post by: RHPConsult on September 13, 2009, 01:47:35 PM
However, there seems to be no way to arrange them in any order other than alphabetical, unless one appends a digit as a prefix.
iPhoto HELP is silent. "Intuition" has been of no creative (or otherwise) assistance.
Any ideas out there in TeeEssLand?
Post by: sandbox on September 13, 2009, 02:32:20 PM
click on > Organize your photos for the video.
A single photo (A) can be viewed in any of the categories. If a face (yours) is in a place (california) at an event (sky diving) no matter which of the criteria you choose (A) will appear. I keep them in folders by date and then set up different libraries.
Most of my photos have names that I establish when i load them on the desktop first using a batch renaming app.
So, I know when the photo was taken, and the name assigned gives me a pretty good idea what its about when viewing it in a list and then I can use a category search to select a photo.
Post by: RHPConsult on September 13, 2009, 04:24:57 PM
Post by: Xairbusdriver on September 13, 2009, 09:41:59 PM
QUOTE
them by years, by family, by major event photographed, etc. etc.
Why not label them as such? I think you are somewhat over-zealous in your folder creation routine, but folders usually sort by numbers first, then alphabetically (at least for now, no telling when Apple "management" may decide to change that!).Besides, isn't the majority of the date stuff already in the meta data? Can't iPhoto sort on that?
So...
Folder 1: 2001
Folder 2: 2003
etc.
In folder 2001:
January
In January:
Events
Family
Weird Ones
Don't let anyone see these!
And so on. Surely iPhoto has a way to find folders? If not, try making even more with the Smart Folder method, which is probably what you're already doing:
Events folder
By Date
By Family
Inside the Date one use the following date format:
2001_01
2001_02
etc.
Inside Family:
Peairs_Kids
Peairs_R
Smith
Williams
etc.
And, then there are Faces, events, places. With only 400+ images, it shouldn't take more than a few weeks for iPhoto to be able to recognize 50% of the people, the rest will be automagic. Places will take only a few months to reach the majority. Events may be for your ancestors!
Post by: RHPConsult on September 13, 2009, 10:17:46 PM
I should twll The Rest of the Story ,Since, over the past several years (at least 8) I have constructed several slide shows for various family celebrations, some of which included some very old pictures, from many, many, many venues (that's 4000+ pics ABD) a whole passel of which were first scanned (slides, 35mm prints) and then (when iPhoto came along) put in its Library, I want to be able to sort on many dimensions.
- Canal Lewisville, OH 1925-40
- Roswell, NM 1946-49
- Occidental College 1949-51
- 2d Armored Div 1951-53
- Glacier National Park
- Wedding (1st and only) 1954
- Mark -1956
- John - 1958
- Anne - 1963 . . . and so on, at least 75 times, and counting
How can I entitle those Albums so the Albums can be ordered in alternate ways. I do not have my Albums as subordinate to Events, has that been my mistake? Misunderstanding? They are a "roster" under "Albums", which seemed like a good idea at the time.
Post by: sandbox on September 14, 2009, 07:05:07 AM
question #1 do you want to sequence the folders?
#2 do you want to sequence the photos/movies/slideshows
If the winner is #2 then use Bach Change under the Photo menu
http://www.learningelectric.com/iphoto6/15.mov
I Bach my photos on the desktop before I import them to any program. I don't use iPhoto exclusively. Since all of your photos are in iPhoto you can rename and renumber them.... a folder at a time.
.
.
If you want to rename or sequence your folders, I don't think iPhoto will give you the tools to Bach them. They would need to be changed manually.
.
.
Once the files. not the folders, are renamed you can arrange them anyway you want, access them in multiple ways..
.
name_date_place....date_place_name......place_name_date??? all included in the renaming. Use lowercase font only and no spaces.
.
.
If you only want to view them in a different index...or Arranged differently, go to VIEW in the menu and click on Arrange photos. Choices are = Date, Title, Rating.
.
.
If this answer is on the wrong track....please ignore the my Propeller Hat.
Post by: RHPConsult on September 14, 2009, 09:26:54 AM
Since the very beginning of the Mac Era, one could treat labels as humans have always used their language . . . using words, w/caps, avoiding abbreviations, etc to make those labels quickly recognizable. Then, by further using spaces and other VERY simple strategems (first/last letters of the alphabet, or simple symbols = 1,2,3/•/#. or spaces) one could reorder multiple items in even long rosters of files/folders w/o doing too much damage to a ready recognition of the meaning of the title . . . . anything to avoid the madness of DOS' nerdy restrictions. Surprise, surprise.
In iPhoto I want to be able to re-order to my Album labels (WITHOUT doing damage to their specific meanings). Just the titles. "Batches" do not apply. It's data, not metadata, in which I'm interested.
A rough analogy in AddressBook: I have about 20 subGROUPS of addressees arranged beneath ALL (which = > 1200), which are especially useful, for example, in applying multiple addresses to e-mails. Some of these Groups' lables are only slightly different from others with the same basic names: e.g. FAMILY, Immediate; FAMILY, Extended; FAMILY, Total. The problem is IF I wish to move these GROUPS ("albums", if you will) to the top of the Group Roster, AddressBook won't allow spaces before the names, so I've used Alpha-Numeric codes (A1, B3, C2) to accomplish the rearranging of subsets of Groups in that roster without doing too much "injustice" to their real titles.
I have many more photo ALBUMS than address GROUPS. I just want to be able to put the listing of them in MY sequence, without nesting, of nested-nests of items. OK? And, if at all possible, w/o using alphanumeric prefixes that beome too long and confusing. (Never forget, my eyes are almost 81 years old and my next cataract excision isn't scheduled until October 29!
Any ideas for this presumably, I thought, simple problem?
Post by: sandbox on September 14, 2009, 01:10:28 PM
My fault, you would like to hack the iphoto.db file....danger....danger.
It is highly recommended that one does not edit/hack-into the database file in iPhoto
There is no front door that I can see in iPhoto for sequencing the albums...(albums are folders in finder)
You can look at the files on a code level in Text Wrangler but i don't think you will get far?
If you have some time to kill make a copy of the file and have a look.
home/pictures/albums
Post by: Xairbusdriver on September 14, 2009, 04:54:13 PM
My point is, neither of these apps were designed for extended sorting and listing in user-defined ways. Apple decided how the lists would sort. Period. Apparently the same list coding that has been used for eons, alphabetical using ASCII character codes. That puts numbers ahead of letters, capital letters ahead of lower case and most punctuation at the end. Of course the OS further restrict a very few characters for itself. The forward slash (/) and colon (
come to mind, since they are used to display the 'path' of a file. Unless you make some changes in your prefs, adding a period to the beginning of a file/folder name will simply make it disappear. It's not destroyed, it's just hidden from noobies.Naming images/files/folders/dogs and especially cats, is a learned skill. The Mac made it very simple for us to use just about any method we wanted without too much bother. And that was fine when we could store the whole OS on a 400 MB floppy!
Now, the OS itself, contains 10,000+ separate files, and many users would be amazed that there are several hundred those files/folders on their hard drives!Unfortunately, most of us don't realize our current naming methods are not 'scalable' to the eventual size of our collections of similar stuff. At that point, we realize that we should have used a different app or at least a different naming procedure. Of course, this is like closing the barn door after the water has passed under the bridge!
Another possible exercise you may want to investigate is keeping/creating more than one iPhoto Library. I understand this is now possible but have absolutely no experience. And I fear that all this would end up doing is to prevent having the same image in more than one Library, which could be another big headache. It would, obviously require more disk space as each Library has many ancillary files in it, besides just the images.
Sorry not to have an easy solution for you. I know it can be frustrating to deal with built-in limitations of an app. But, if enough people complain about them, some industrious developer will come along and create a solution, that just may be longer than you can stand (or lie, as the case may be) to wait!
I suppose you have accessed the Apple Forums concerning iPhoto? There are usually thousands of posts about every conceivable problem and often a quite expert solution for many of them.
On the bright side of this, think about what would happen if all you had were hard copies of each image?!
And how many albums would it take to store them? How many rooms would be needed? Boggles the mind!
Post by: RHPConsult on September 15, 2009, 03:20:30 AM
I tried to remember that in the last couple of days and re-institute my own search for the solution to the "problem" I attempted to cite in this thread – with only limited success.
PROBLEM SOLVED!
I can't tell you why, but this apparently is Apple's "solution" to my re-arrangement dilemma.
Albums, as listed, CAN be reordered by holding down OPTION, then clicking and dragging the Album title to another position in the existing roster.
EXCEPT, you can only move a given Album title four (4) lines at a time. Then, drop it and pick it up again for another 4-line move.
Piece o' cake . . almost.
The big question is "why" this departure from the simple strategem of click-n-drag moving of Bookmarks in Safari. I had tried that . . . repeatedly and unsuccessfully . . . before initiating this thread.
Thanks to all who endeavored to help.
Post by: sandbox on September 15, 2009, 08:49:47 AM
I assumed that was too easy of an answer and blew right past it.
When I work with CaMedia there is no datafile.db... it accesses the named folders through the frontend like Photoshop.
Post by: RHPConsult on September 15, 2009, 09:43:44 AM
However, the ability to arrange (and re-arrange, maybe even re-re-arrange) them in some desirable sequence – w/o messing-up the "meaning" of their respective album titles – seemed like a desirable goal, and one that shouldn't tax one or more cerebral structures too mightily.
But it did.
And then, finally, Occam's Razor was "applied" and came into "effect" (as it does/should in more occasions of modern discourse/problem-solving than it does!) and there you are!
Thanks, again.
Post by: sandbox on September 15, 2009, 10:31:03 AM
Absolute simplicity would demonstrate that turning right (to Ockham) or left (to Occam) doesn't matter because eventually you will end up in the same place.
Post by: RHPConsult on September 15, 2009, 11:11:42 AM
But my situation gets even simpler AND more puzzling.
iPhoto 8.1 is now sorting "normally". No CMD/right-click now required! Just click-n-drag.
It's as though there was some kind of gear inside, with too viscous a lubrication delaying its responsiveness . . . err sumnthin.
So, as vexing as this has been for some time, it now is truly a non-problem . . . as Macs should be, donschasee.
Go figure.
Post by: sandbox on September 15, 2009, 02:00:01 PM
Post by: Xairbusdriver on September 16, 2009, 09:22:19 AM
Another problem created by computers which made sorting lists almost automatic, even when humans didn't want or need it! 
Post by: RHPConsult on September 16, 2009, 09:52:45 AM
Post by: Xairbusdriver on September 16, 2009, 03:31:30 PM
QUOTE
Why it wasn't working since I began thiniking about this a couple of months ago, and now it is . . .???
You're old enough now, that the computer respects you?
Post by: RHPConsult on September 16, 2009, 11:23:26 PM