archiving your photographs without iphoto

i've always hated the way iphoto forces you to adopt its system for archiving your photographs. it may work fine, while you're browsing around inside iphoto itself, but it's a major pain in the arse, if you just want to find an image quickly, without the overhead of firing up iphoto - plus, it makes finding a particular image on an archived CD or DVD an even more teethgrinding experience.

here's a handy technique i use for organising my photos into folders named by date taken. it makes for an easy to navigate archival system - with no need to depend on iphoto.

1. before you start, grab yourself a copy of datetree - a great wee utility which sorts photos by EXIF creation date

2. if you havenae done so already, set your prefs to open imagecapture when you connect your digital camera, rather thaniphoto. the pref for this is actually well hidden inside imagecapture itself....

3. when you connect your digital camera, imagecapture will open and the camera dialogue will come up. set "download to" to point to wherever you want to download your photos to, prior to sorting and set "automatic task" to point to datetree [you did remember to install that into your 'applications' folder, didn't you? ].

[you'll only have to do this the first time. next time you connect your camera and imagecapture opens, the dialogue will have these settings filled in already]

4. click "download all" or "download some" to download your snaps.

5. imagecapture will download your photos and fire up datetree, which will present you with a dialogue asking you where you want it to sort your photos into [i usually just have it sort them into the same folder as i downloaded the snaps to and then move them to my archive later.]

[again, you'll only have to do this the first time. datetree will remember these settings for next time]

6. click the "organise" button and let datetree do its stuff. when it's done you can quit it and switch to the finder and you'll find that datetree has copied all the photos into folders titled by the date the photo was taken [actually this is one of the minor annoyances i have with datetree - it copies the photos, rather than moving them, so you'll now have to throw away the original photos and keep the folders with the copies in ]

7. then, as necessary, i add a bit of descriptive text onto the end of specific folders to indicate if the photos therein were taken at a certain place or on a certain occasion and there you have it - a nice photo archive, easily searchable by date or folder keyword and free from all the unnecessary cataloging bloat that iphoto uses.

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