I recently updgraded my Hackintosh due to a hard drive failure and decided I’d start using Apple software to manage and maintain all of my digital files (pictures/music/videos). My main reason for this was the ease of use, simplicity yet powerful features that iMovie offered. So naturally, iMovie was the first program that I began to use frequently. Next was iTunes. I had always stayed away from managing my music in iTunes, but now that I’ve owned every iPhone, I figure, I may as well convert and start using iTunes. Plus, with the addition of the Remote app, I have become a huge fan of iTunes and the ability to control the music played in my house from any room. Now, onto the last bit of personal media that I needed to maintain. Pictures.
I had always been a fan of just organizing my photos using good folder structure and naming a heirarchy (which I still adhere to), but I figure that takes a lot of time, and I don’t necessarily need full control. Apple develops software to take the work and worry out of tedious tasks like that, so I decided… I’m going to start managing my pictures in iPhoto. Whoops!
First of all, I didn’t setup my iPhoto database in the “traditional” sense. By default, iPhoto wants to copy all photos to the iPhoto database. I did not enable this option. I instead, left all of my pictures on my secondary hard drive (around 75,000 images) and let iPhoto run its scan. It took nearly 2 hours to complete on my absolute beast of a machine – more to come on that – but once it completed, there were problems. Upon trying to browse the pictures, nearly every picture i tried to enlarge, I was presented with a large gray triangle with an exclamation point in it. All the thumbnail images were displayed in iPhoto, but upon trying to view the large version of any thumbnail, iPhoto gave me the gray exclamation point.
I am currently in the process of rebuilding/repairing my iPhoto database as per some user suggestions in various forums, but it has been stuck at 99% for the last 30 minutes. I’m losing confidence and starting to consider switching to Aperture, or maybe back to Picasa3. Picasa has always done a good job and never had a problem with the amount of images that I’ve thrown at it. The fact that iPhoto creates and maintains an entire database seems a little stupid to me – especially considering the fact that I didn’t import any photos and the iPhoto database is currently at 6.4 gigabytes. Seems like too much. I’m going to let this thing run, but I’m curious to hear if anyone out there prefers Aperture over iPhoto, or if there is another strong photo management application.
