Life Less Literary

Aaargh! I fucking HATE iPhoto!

I wouldn’t really use it, but it’s just there on my Mac, which is nowadays my only portable computer, and hence the one I use to download photos onto when I’m on the move. And it least it lets me import the pictures and run a quick slide show to see what they look like (albeit one that moves around annoyingly so I can never see the full images).

All well and good, until I decide to do something with it. As with almost all Mac software, and increasingly PC software too, iPhoto likes to protect you from the messy stuff going on behind the scenes. So I’ve had to drill through the hard disk to find out where it actually puts my pictures: in subdirectories of subdirectories of subdirectories, somewhere a couple of miles beneath my “pictures” folder. So far so good. Again rather annoyingly the pictures are stored in individual folders for each day, so I have to keep drilling down and back up again. And when I reach my destination, all of the images are JPEGs. No sign of my camera RAW files, until I drill one step further down into “originals”. Thank goodness, there they are.

So I copy all of the files from “originals” over to my PC hard disk. Then I do it for the “originals” folder from the next day. As I am doing so, I am also copying more stuff to the Mac. My hard disk is getting dangerously full. So I delete all the images from one folder up, because they’re just JPEGs converted by iPhoto, right?

Moving to the PC, I find I have lots of JPEGs mixed in with my RAW files, duplicates. Gradually I spot a pattern emerging. All of the RAW files which were taken in portrait have an accompanying JPEG. Then there are some more JPEGs, which were the images I took on my second memory card: I changed the settings to JPEG, because I was rapidly running out of space for photos. Gradually as I go through them all, I realise some pictures are missing. I still have the thumbnails in iPhoto, though not the full-sized images as I have since deleted all of these. Then it dawns on me, all of the missing images are landscape photos taken in JPEG mode.

And that’s it. They’re gone for good. Deleted by my own hastiness, and Apple’s appalingly structured file-system. So, to summarise, in iPhoto the folder called “originals” does not contain copies of all your originals, as I had assumed. If your file is a landscape RAW, it will contain that file. If it is a portrait RAW, it will contain that file plus a rotated JPEG copy. If it is a portrait JPEG, the folder will contain a rotated JPEG copy. And if it is a landscape JPEG, it’s skipped and goes straight to the top-level folder. Which also contains copies of all of the other variations. In summary, each picture is stored between one and three times, in varying locations. Why? I had always assumed that the quintillions of hidden files you get when copying Mac files to a PC contained some sort of metadata, surely it wouldn’t be too hard to add to that metadata a little something about whether an image should be rotated (as Photoshop on the PC does, and many other programs) rather than having to make up to two additional copies of the file?

Mood: furious. And depressed. All of my best photos from last night were, of course, landscape JPEGs. But then, I would say that. It’s the ones that got away.