Gordon's Tech

Saturday, January 17, 2004

Apple - Discussions - iPhoto 4: Consolidate multiple libraries

Apple - Discussions - iPhoto 4: Consolidate multiple libraries

Update 1/05: I now have a much better discussion of this on my personal digital photography/iPhoto page. This commentary is somewhat obsolete.

This technique works best in my testing so far. Consider two libraries: Main and Secondary.

1. Using iPhoto Library Manager or similar software, open Secondary Library. Adjust albums so all images appears in EXACTLY one album. (Apple has an AppleScript to find images not in any library, see AppleScript site for iPhoto.)
1b. OPTIONAL. In Secondary Library edit roll names to descriptive names.
2. Burn Secondary Library to iPhoto Disc from iPhoto.
3. Switch iPhoto to Main Library. Insert iPhoto Disc.
4. Expand view of iPhoto Disc. Select ALL albums. Drag and drop on Main Library icon.

In testing this preserves:

1. Some roll information. (I have a suspicion it ONLY preserves roll information if you've edited the default names -- based on some other experiments I did on iPhoto 2.
2. The album titles, comments and members.
3. Photo file names, titles, and descriptions.
4. I suspect iPhoto 2 keywords, at least, do NOT make the trip.

I deliberately imported an album from the Secondary Library I knew referenced photos that were in another already imported Secondary Library album. I received a warning about duplicate photos. I said to exclude duplicates from import. 15 photos were not imported, presumably because they'd been previously imported. So this may help.

Until someone writes a smart import/merge, possibly using AppleScript, this may be our best option.

Friday, January 16, 2004

Install iMovie 4 on an iPod

The iLife installer wants to put all apps on the boot drive. My boot drive is full. This is how I put iMovie 4.0 on my iPod. I have a dual USB 600 MHz G3 iBook.

1. Use Onyx to allow Finder to see hidden files.
2. Browsed DVD and copied the iMovie package to my iPod.
3. Used Pacifist to extract iMovie app.
4. Ran iMovie 4.0. It showed my music, titles, etc.

I haven't used it much.

Apple - iPhoto 4.0 - impressions

[update 1/24/04: after much testing I recommend that iPhoto 2 users NOT upgrade to iPhoto 4 -- yet. iPhoto 4 is amazingly faster than previous versions, but it has serious quality issues. I'm seeing unmistakeable signs of integer overflows. There's some bad code in iPhoto 4, and with that comes an intolerable risk of losing your valued photographs (not that iPhoto 2 is necessarily safe to use either, but I think iPhoto 4 is worse at this time).

Wait for a bug fix release, then wait a few more weeks for news, then upgrade.]

Apple - iLife
1. iLife can only install on the boot drive. Bad sign right at the start. A boot drive restriction suggests a pretty bad architecture. You need to "customize" the install to select individual apps. (You can work around this, see a later post in this blog.)

2. iDVD still only works with Apple's SuperDrive.

3. There's minimal new support for consolidating libraries. See my later (separate) post on a possible technique.

4. Keywords are still worthless. Or almost worthless. Outstanding incompetence. You still can't sort keywords. You really need to stick to about 8 keywords at most. The ridiculous UI is unchanged.

5. You can't search directly on comments or titles anymore. You can only search directly on keywords. Basically, to locate things, you create a smart album and view the results. The smart albums have replaced most search functionality.

6. Because of the way iPhoto now does caching, the technique (see prior blog entries) of hosting iPhoto images on an SMB HFS+ sparseimage w/ 802.11b access works outstandingly well. If you try to edit you have to wait a while, but the thumbnails are cached locally. This is worth the price of the upgrade to me. We'll see what kinds of interesting file corruption I get. (The sparseimage file is journaled, interestingly. So maybe the library will survive network disruption.)

7. My iTunes library is on an SMB share, but it's stored natively (NTFS). iPhoto 2 would show the songs when iTunes was running, but it wouldn't play them. iPhoto 4 at first use showed them, but didn't allow me to select individual songs - they were grayed out. It did allow me to select a Playlist.

With a wired LAN connection I could play the music with my slideshow. With an 802.11b connection I couldn't - at first. Then I got the black screen of death (multilingual hard reset directions) on awakening with iPhoto running. After restart iPhoto relocated my SMB shared mounted sparsemimage. I tried again with iTunes running and my NTFS-native iTunes library loaded -- this time the Slideshow worked over 802.11b.

8. The UI for switching aspect ratio constraints on cropping between portrait and landscape is weird. It looks broken, but it still works. Some ratios (DVD) don't allow switching, others do. Switch by scrollling down to a checkable item that shows the aspect ratio that doesn't match the images current ratio. The default matches the image. You can still option drag to switch on the fly. Bad design.

9. In some testing iPhoto 4 appears to have spontaneously deleted an album. Fortunately I'm only working on my test images. If this sort of thing is mentioned by others I'll go back to iPhoto 2.

10. iPhoto 4 uses only a bit more space than iPhoto 2 in the individual image library when starting out. However the aggressive caching strategy uses substantial space on the system disk. I don't yet know where iPhoto is doing its caching, but we'll need a way to clean this out periodically.

Overall iLife fits the usual somewhat disappointing pattern of recent Apple s/w releases -- too early, unfinished, unMaclike and with some boneheaded design decisions. Apple is way short of quality control and testing resources.

Universal travel charging with laptop or USB hub: Cellphone, iPod, Palm, camera etc?

From: jfaughnan@spamcop.net (John Faughnan)
Newsgroups: alt.cellular.sprintpcs,comp.sys.mac.hardware.misc,
alt.comp.sys.palmtops.pilot,comp.sys.palmtops.pilot,comp.sys.laptops
Subject: Universal travel charging with laptop or USB hub:
Cellphone, iPod, Palm, camera etc?
NNTP-Posting-Host: 209.98.142.122
Message-ID: <5c0dbfb4.0401161137.3f143a2c@posting.google.com>

I think the USB cable standard is becoming the de facto universal
standard for charging LiOn batteries. I can charge my Tungsten E via
USB cable connected to a laptop or a powered USB hub. I recently
bought a lightweight adapter for $20 that claims to charge my Spring
Samsung cell phone via USB. The standard iPod will not recharge via
USB (needs firewire), but the new iPod-mini WILL (another advantage to
the mini for travelers!). I don't know of any digital cameras that
recharge via the USB connector but if they don't yet exist they will
soon.

Zip-Linq [1] makes very lightweight and portable USB cables that can
also work as data sync cables for a Tungsten E, and are used with some
portable travel mice. (They are not USB 2.0 cables and would not be a
good choice for iPod sync even if they had the right connector). This
cable, which uses a mini-USB connector will work with some digital
camera. Because of the business market, it's also possible to find
very compact and lightweight powered USB hubs with well made power
converters.

I think we're seeing an interesting example of convergence. For years
geek travelers, who carry a melance of chargers and cables, have
yearned for a simple solution. Magnetic induction charging solutions
have seemed close at hand, but never quite made it.

Maybe now the market, in a curious fashion resembling natural
selection in action, has converged on a standard.

A lightweight powered USB hub, itself with a lightweight and efficient
transformer designed for travel, can (in theory) charge at least 4
connected peripherals -- as long as they use this "USB standard"
charging approach. Many of the peripherals: iPod, cellphone, PDA,
camera may further use the same cable (USB 2.0 with standard connector
and mini-USB connector -- see [1]) for data synchronization --
eliminating another set of cables.

If one travels with a computer the internal USB ports may suffice for
2-4 devices depending on the computer. In that case a passive USB hub,
like the one I carry in my laptop's PCMCIA slot, the laptop and its
power adaptor, and a small number of very compact USB cables can
replace a mess of cabling and chargers/transformers.

Best of all, there are no new intellectual property issues here. Costs
are also very low.

USB charging is slow, but most of us sleep sometime. A good time to
recharge all devices.

I'm going to warily test out the phone USB charging adapter. Since the
phone I use (Samsung) wasn't designed to charge with this adapter I'm
running a risk, but I expect other phones will be designed to work
this way.

Anyone else have comments and experiences to share with regard to USB
device charging? I'm particularly interested in experiences with cell
phones, digital cameras (if any), the new mini-iPods and passive hubs.

addenda: eForcity sells a "universal USB charger"
http://www.eforcity.com/dothusbtcad1.html

This is a very nice wall adaptor. Not expensive. I'm going to try combining it with a passive hub to see if I can charge multiple devices all at once. eForcity has a number of quite interesting products along this line, including iPod chargers.

meta: jfaughnan, jgfaughnan, charger, adaptor, adapter, power adaptor,
power adapter, converter, convertor, USB, mini-B, USB sync,
synchronization, HotSync, laptop, portability, travel, cellular,
mobile phone, sprint, Samsung, portability, efficiency, convergence,
transformer, AC/DC, wall wart

[1] http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=5c0dbfb4.0312121044.6d00220%40posting.google.com