I’ve been using iPhoto now since around 2006, there’s no doubt that it’s a great piece of software that makes managing your photos a breeze as well as sharing photos on Facebook, Flikr etc…

Two things lately have made me question how I used it though.

First my image library is big (ok I take a lot of {sometimes meaningless} photos), but more  annoying is that iPhoto started to eat my photos. I have read a few forum posts about this and I’m still not sure if it’s something with the most recent version (iPhoto 11) or if it’s a bug or bugs that have been around for a while.

Either way I found just recently that several albums of images were missing from iPhoto – not good.

Like most users I have always just let iPhoto manage everything that comes off my camera and iPhone, including iPhone videos, but as soon as I have found that images are missing I’ve decided to take back the management of the media and here I’ll show you how to do the same.

Setup a referenced iPhoto library

First up let me explain a little on how iPhoto manages your images. When you import normally what it does it store all of your images (and videos) in the iPhoto Library. Unless you’ve changed this along the way it will be in your Pictures folder (have a look in Finder you’ll see).

You won’t by default see folders or anything else, just one file called iPhoto Library but that is where the data is stored. So when things go missing it’s a bit hard to work out why and how, so by setting up what’s called a referenced library you can decide where your images are stored but still use iPhoto to categorise and work with in exactly the same way you would normally.

Firstly what I do is create a main folder in my Pictures folder called Referenced Images, and from now on that’s where I import my images to – a little more on this later on.

Next what needs to be done is to change the settings in iPhoto so that it does not automatically copy images into its own library but rather it just references the images that you show it.

To do this, choose Preferences from the iPhoto menu then click advanced (see screen shot opposite) – uncheck the option copy all items to the iPhoto Library and you’re done.

What this does is allow you to drag photos into iPhoto and it will not take control of the files but rather it will just remember where the photos are.

Importing photos to your referenced library

Back to my point about making a folder to store all of your images in, as I said I call it Referenced Images but you can call it anything really. The change you have to make to your workflow is that instead of importing images directly from your camera or memory card to iPhoto, you have to import them to your above mentioned folder first.

OS X has a great tool to do this, Image Capture. We’ve written about this great little tool before, check out that post here. Briefly, use Image Capture to import your photos to your photo folder, read the post mentioned to get a full understanding on how to do this, but it’s not hard to work out.

Then once the images are on your disk, open the folder in Finder and simply drag them to iPhoto. Now it will import them  so you can edit and share using all the cool tools in iPhoto but it will leave your photos where you put them.

Tagged as: aperture, image capture, iphoto, photos