Merging iPhoto Libraries: more problems

John's Digital Photography Page: Merging iPhoto Libraries

I really don't understand what's going on with Product Management for iPhoto. There are people satisified with iPhoto, I think they fall into a large category of software users that simply have pretty low expectations. They don't really expect software to work very well, and as long as they don't lose too many photos too often they can live with that.

Here's some more problems related to keywords and iPhoto that I learned of from KF - someone who knows a great deal about iPhoto keywords. I shall have to add them to the page I link to here:

...There is badness if libraries do not have identical keywords lists.

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- create a new library Library 1
- add a photograph Photograph 1 to Library 1, and assign it keyword "a"
- create a new library Library 2
- add a photograph Photograph 2 to Library 1, and assign it keyword "b"
- merge Library 2 into Library 1 with the disk image technique

Result: Photograph 2 has keyword "a". It should have keyword "b".
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I believe this is explainable. iPhoto is storing keywords by ID number instead of name, and IDs are assigned to new keywords sequentially...

Burning a disk from within iPhoto is worse. I'm not sure what happens there, but it's strange. Here's a test case I sent to Apple:

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- create a new library
- add two photographs to the library
- create two new keywords using the 'Add' button
- assign the first keyword to the first photograph and the second keyword to second photograph
- drag the second keyword above the first in the preferences
- burn disc

Result: On reading the library from the disc, the first photograph has the second keyword and the second photograph has no keyword.