integration

i knew that i had a lot of photos. but, i had no idea exactly how many. right now i'm importing all my photographs into iPhoto and it's telling me i have 35,471 so far. until last night they were spread across a bookshelf of dvd backups and an armload of smallish external hard drives. i bought a 500 gigabyte internal drive for my PowerMac and last night imported about 20,000 images. this morning i brought in about another 10,000 and now am finishing up by importing the dvds. i should have room for another 50,000 or so, which will keep me cool for a few years more.

i tried out iPhoto a few years ago and was not impressed. but, apple seems to have improved it dramatically. it operates quickly and is handling my tens of thousands of photos nicely. i love the way iPhoto puts all your pictures into a giant contact sheet. i put the thumbnail size down as small as it will go and it turns into a tapestry.

it feels really good to have all my images consolidated. a few weeks back, working on a magazine, i remembered a picture. it took me nearly all day to find it (it happened to be on a firewire drive that i thought was on but was off, duh). this triggered my research into ways to organize photos. for the past three years they have been organized by a variety of methods defined by my different camera upload softwares. it turns out that i had the answer under my nose with iPhoto, but i looked at quite a few packages before settling on it. the most powerful was aperture--from apple too--sort of iPhoto on steroids, but i had a lot of trouble with it and it seemed very slow by comparison and even corrupted one of my hard drives by creating folders that crashed my system when i tried to open them. i had to mount the drive on my PC laptop and delete the files through windows. the problem may have been related to that drive's windows file system... who knows. anyway, while i liked a lot of the organizational aspects of aperture, i didn't like the way it imported. iPhoto does a great job of sucking up whatever photos are on a hard drive and letting you organize later. maybe there is a way to do this in aperture but i couldn't figure it out and i wasn't too keen on spending $300 on photo management software. so, the short of the long is that with now almost 40,000 pictures, iPhoto is doing great. i hope it continues!