iPhoto and durable photo management

When managing your digital photos, there are three things you really should do:

• Make backups of your backups of your backups.  These are your photos, don't mess about here - make backups regularly and store one of your backups someplace remote.
• Use JPG for your file formats.  If you end up with a camera saving in some goofy format either convert to JPG or get a new camera.  JPG is like mp3 is for music - it'll be a durable photo format that will be around for a very long time and is supported by lots of tools.
• Don't use software to organize your photos for you.  Use a simple directory format.  Software and their proprietary organization approaches will come and go but simple directories and folders will be around for a long time to come.  The following blog article is on this last point.

In 1999 when I bought my HP Photosmart C30 I started organizing my photos in a simple directory structure: Photos/YYYY/YYYYMMDD.  Something like this:

Over the years I would try whatever photo management software came with new cameras or emerging opensource packages.  l always regretted it as the photos would end up being hidden inside of some database and difficult to extract.  I would end up maintaining photos in two locations - the photo software and my simple archive.  That is, until I would get rid of the software and proprietary database files.

All that changed when I drank the Apple, iPhone and iPhoto koolaid when the iPhone came out.  The iPhoto software hits the magic "good enough" point Apple does so well and the integration with the iPhone Just Worked.  For the first few months I maintained iPhone photos in two locations - iPhoto and my simple archive.  But as I started using iPhoto more and more, using it to maintain photo albums, I just got lazy and one day stopped copying files from iPhoto into the archive.

I did continue to use my simple archive for regular camera photos but of course over time I started using the phone more and more for photos and conventional cameras only for special occasions like holidays.  I would pull in other camera pictures from the my simple archive into iPhoto to create albums.

I kept telling myself I could extract the photos any time - you can enter the iPhoto database structure as a filesystem (~/Pictures/iPhoto Library - "Show Package Contents"), similar to my simple archive approach.  iPhoto's File->Export function was there of course, but it would not properly set file modified date meaning it was more difficult to get into the right folder without looking at header data in the JPG.  Meanwhile, time goes on, and nothing lasts forever, maybe not even iPhoto.

That brings us to today and here's my strategy:  I've accepted that iPhoto will hold the "master" version of all iPhone (and more recently Samsung Galaxy s2 photos) and I'll occasionally extract these photos from iPhoto and fold them into my simple archives.

Here is how I did it:

1. Within iPhoto, Command-F search all your Photos for "iPhone".  Assuming you haven't otherwise marked your photos (title, tags, event names, ...) with "iPhone", iPhoto gives you a subset of your Photos created with the iPhone.

2. Within iPhoto, use File-Export to save these photos to the filesystem.  They'll be saved as one big set in whatever directory you specify.  I named the files with prefix "iphone" and selected the option to sequentially number them.  That way I can always go searching in my simple archive for iPhone photos by filename if I need to.

3. Use MacPort.org's "port" command to install jhead.  Run "jhead -ft *.JPG *.jpg" at the shell to correct all the modified dates so your files are date/time stamped with the date/time the picture was taken.  I also had a handful of .PNG (screen captures) and .MOV (movies) files and I just left these dates as they were.  Probably wrong, but I only had a few.

4.  I wrote a small shell script to organze the extracted pictures by date to match my simple archive format.  Here it is:

# 
# orgpix.sh - organize iPhoto exported photos by date 
# Files will be moved to into a directory structure like this: 
#
# YYYY 
#    YYYYMMDD
#    YYYYMMDD 
#    ... 
# YYYY 
# ... 
# 
# Place this file in the directory containing all the files you want 
# to organize and run it from there. 
# 
# 
ls -1 *.jpg | while read fn; do 
   eval set `stat -f "%Sa" -t "%Y %m %d" "$fn"` 
   export year=$1 
   export month=$2 
   export day=$3 
   echo "$fn : $year $month $day" 
   mkdir $year 2> /dev/null 
   mkdir ${year}/"${year}${month}${day}" 2> /dev/null 
   mv "$fn" ${year}/"${year}${month}${day}" 
done

5. Used cp to merge the newly organized files and directories into my main photo archive:

cp -Rvpn 2008/ /Path/to/Photo/Archives/2008

(I was tentative.  I ran it for each year by hand as I wanted to make sure it was working properly by checking a few file and directory creations as I went.  This could be scripted as well.)

So there you go.  All photos taken by the iPhone extracted from iPhoto and merged into my simple but very durable photo archives structure.

I repeated the above to extract my Samsung Galaxy s2 (Command-F search for "GT-I9100") photos as well.

Postnote: If you can't subset out the photos taken by the iPhone within iPhoto, you could just extract everything and use jhead's EXIF header reading to determine what camera took a photo.