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Photos used to be easy to manage in the pre-digital era. At that point I should be able to bring the jpegs home into folders that match the RAW originals sturcture and abandon iphoto for good - but to bring them into a sensible structure I'm going to need Lightroom's ability to sort filter and rename.In The Old Days, We Only Printed the Good Ones Given the files in iphoto don't need editing, but only accessing I think it's probably reasonably safe to leave them in their current location until I have the whole collection sensibly and consistently keyworded in a format that Lightroom can read. All the original files (RAW these days but jpegs and scanned tiffs for earlier stuff) are in a separate date ordered folder structure which was easy to create a catalog for in Lightroom.Īfter an early disastrous experience I never trusted iphoto's arcane and changeable file handling to manage my originals. I only have edited jpeg images in iphoto which don't require any access except to the iphoto keywords to find them. I'm planning to switch from iphoto to Lightroom completely over time. However, I think, with what I'm doing, temporarily pointing Lightroom at the iphoto storage folders via an alias makes some sense. On further consideration, I think if you have RAW files or original unedited images in iphoto, which are likely to require editing and frequent access then what you say is correct, especially if you have long term plans to run iphoto and Lightroom in tandem. iPhoto 1' may completely re-arrange the iphoto catalog and then LR will be useless! Trying to share the same images between iPhoto and LR will create a world of pain in the future. You will want to organise your files using Lightroom (usually during import) rather than leave them in the iPhoto folder structure. If you won't be using iPhoto again then you can move the files instead which would save space. I would not use aliases, it is better to get the images out of the package.
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You will still be able to use iPhoto on the originals. If you copy the photos as I described then LR will have its own copy.
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I just have to re keyword some 7,''' odd photos, and match 'em up with the RAW and psd versions of the images which are stored elsewhere.
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And generally speaking I don't plan to use the iphoto library much going forward anyway. Now I've only done this with an iphoto library on my imac's internal drive, but I see no reason why an external drive shouldn't work the same way.Įdit to add- clearly there is some risk in borking things for the iphoto library if you leave the images in the iphoto library - the safest way of doing it is undoubtedly to copy everything into a new location on an external drive as sizzling badger says. I've done the former and it works OK so far. Lightroom has no trouble seeing inside the aliases and the photos can then be imported into a catalogue from there, either remaining in situ in the iphoto library or copying them to new locations. You just do the Show Package contents as sizzlingbadger describes, then right click on the folders you wish to get lightroom to see and create the aliases which you then drag to somewhere convenient. An alternative to actually copying the contents of the package (which with a large iphoto library clearly takes up a lot of harddrive and needs to be redone if the iphoto library changes, which may create issues with lightroom finding the files) is to create an alias to the originals folder (and/or the modified folder if you also want lightroom to be able to see the edited files in iphoto) in the iphoto folder.