iPhoto Book Themes - Printed Guides

Those of you who've followed my writings know that I'm an avid photographer and have amassed more than 50,000 photos in my iPhoto Library. I've created several iPhoto books and think it's a great way to share your photos, give incredibly special gifts, and also make an obsolescence-proof backup of your photographs.

You might also know that, frustrated with the scant information about the layouts in iPhoto, I created a rather obsessive Web site that documents all of the possible layouts in each iPhoto book theme, in order to make it easier to create iPhoto books. Originally, it was a tool for myself as well as an experiment in giving away information. The site has been live for about a year, and it has steadily grown in popularity. I get letters from people almost every day who've used my site to create their iPhoto books.

For a long time, I've been wanting to create a print version of the Web site (as a PDF, that you can download and print yourself). While the Web site is good for a quick question, I thought it would be handy to have a nicely laid-out concise guide to each iPhoto book theme. In the print version, I have given examples of every single possible layout for each theme, and made it easy to figure out how to recreate those layouts in your own book. (The Web site, is nowhere near as complete.)

So there are 16 beautiful little mini e-books, one for each iPhoto book theme. They're almost done, and now I'm just working out the details about selling them online.

Meanwhile, I'd love to give you a sample. It'll be a PDF of the guide to iPhoto's Modern Lines book theme. It's absolutely free, and the only thing I ask in return is that you tell me if you find it useful and if you'd ever see yourself buying such a guide for any of the other themes.

To get your copy, just drop me a line and ask for it!

Thanks for your interest.

TimeMachine doesn't back up iPhoto (if iPhoto is open)

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my travails with backing up my obscenely huge iPhoto library. It turns out that although Apple promises to "[take] care of everything else. Automatically. In the background." the truth is that Time Machine won't always back up an iPhoto library if it's open. In fact, it won't back up my iPhoto library ever if it's open. Is it backing up yours? I don't know. You should check.

I promised to get back to you when Apple got back to me. They did finally call me last week, and said, well, to solve the problem, simply close iPhoto and then do a backup. Well, Time Machine is supposed to backup on its own. That's the whole point. What's the point of automating backups if I have to choose them manually? The guy from Apple offered to walk me through starting a new iPhoto library (oh yeah, that's really helpful, thanks).

Maybe I'm naive, but I was pretty amazed that the guy didn't say, "Oh yes, this is a serious problem. We have our technicians working on it and as soon as they have a solution we'll get back to you."

No, he made it sound like I was being a whiner. And that it was my fault that Time Machine wasn't working as advertised. That there was something wrong with my iPhoto library. Give me a break.

But I got a few notes from people saying they had relied on Time Machine for backing up iPhoto and then lost their photos because of it. So, help me get the word out: Time Machine is not reliable about backing up iPhoto. Be sure to check your backups, do them manually, and spread the word so that no-one loses precious files.

The best way to label photos

I'm not in the car often enough to listen to very many podcasts, but I have three favorites: This American Life, NPR's Sunday Puzzler, and Internauta.

This last is a program offered by Catalunya Radio and at least for me, serves the dual purpose of keeping me connected with Catalunya and keeping me up to date on technology there (and here).

The other day I was listening to an interview of David Iglesias, the head of the "Photographic Archive of Girona" about the best ways to organize and manage collections of photos. They have more than 3,000,000 photos!

There were a couple points I found very interesting. First, he recommended scanning positives, not negatives. Second, he suggested scanning at a size that would result in a photo measuring about 2000 x 3000 pixels. Thirdly, he said, make sure you label your photos.

If you don't label, the first two suggestions won't matter because you'll never find the photos anyway.

One lovely advantage of modern digital photos over photos of yesteryear on paper is that the digital ones are automatically dated. So, as soon as you take your camera out of the box, be sure and set the date, and set it correctly.

Next, use a photo organization program like iPhoto, Picasa, or whatever. Even if you do nothing more than put your photos in that program, you'll automatically have your photos organized at least by date (which is much better than having them scattered on your desktop).

The next step is to label them. I have way more photos than I can humanly label, so even if I promise myself a million times that I will label them all, I know I won't. I couldn't if I tried. But the worst part is that thinking I can do it will keep all my photos unlabeled. Instead, I figured out a great shortcut:

I exhaustively label each group of imported photos (in iPhoto these are now Events, but used to be called Rolls, in other programs sometimes they are Albums or Folders) with the names of every single person that appears in that group of photos, as well as the name of the event, location, and any other significant information.



Note that I don't do it before I import (though that is possible in iPhoto) because I don't know who's in the Event at that point. Instead, I make the window a good size so that I can see everyone and still have a place to type in names into the Event window.

Later, I can search for a person's name, and this set of photos will appear. I will have to find the photo of the particular person I want, but that's a piece of cake now that I know it's in this reduced group of photos.

It reminds me of this great quote I saw the other day: "Organizing your email is like alphabetizing your recycling"... which in my mind means, "Don't do more work than you have to".

Time Machine doesn't back up iPhoto

I've confessed before to having a scary number of photographs in my iPhoto library. However, since Steve Jobs promised that iPhoto could handle "hundreds of thousands" and since I only have a measly 40,000 I get downright testy when folks from Apple say I have too many.

This happened the other day. First, Time Machine just stopped working. Up and failed. Said it couldn't find the external drive I had just hooked up even though it had started running because said drive had just been hooked up.

I called Apple's tech support. The guy was nice and knowledgeable. Told me I had formatted the disk incorrectly, that instead of "Apple Partition Map" I should have used "GUID Partition Table" (because I have a MacBook with Intel processor). The only solution was reformatting the drive (using Disk Utility, selecting the drive, clicking the Partition tab, then clicking Options and choosing GUID).

"Why," I asked, "has it worked just fine for the last six months and today it decides it doesn't like that partition system?"

He said it was pretty random. OK, whatever. I reformat the drive.

I do a full backup, Time Machine seems much happier, but I notice that the backup file only takes up 150gb. How can that be if my iPhoto library alone takes up 162gb?

I call Apple up again. The new guy says, oh well, that sounds about right, you know, because of the compression.

But on Apple's site, it specifically says that Time Machine "copies every file exactly (without compression), skipping caches and other files that aren’t required to restore your Mac to its original state".

I point out this discrepancy and he puts me on hold as he goes to check it again.

While he's gone, I go into the backup file to see if my iPhoto Library is even there. Of course, it is not. (How could it be?)

When the Apple guy gets back on the phone, I tell him that Time Machine has not backed up my iPhoto Library at all and he says, with jaw-dropping alacrity:

"Well, it's not perfect."

I'm shocked. A backup program that skips my most important files is "not perfect".

He says, "Well, why don't you just drag the iPhoto Library to your external drive to back it up?"

Apart from the fact that it takes several hours to copy the entire library, and that this seems like a pretty lame workaround for updating the few photos that I might back up each day, I am just flabbergasted that he doesn't admit that the program has a fatal flaw. It doesn't do what it promises.

He offers no apology, no recognition that this is a big deal. I get off quickly before he can harangue me with "Is there anything else I can help you with today?"

I immediately call back and speak to Apple support guy #3. He gets that skipping my iPhoto Library is serious and has me send him my log file. He promises to get it to the engineers and get a response back within 3-5 days. It's been 3 and so far, no news.

Meanwhile, I can't not backup my iPhoto Library so I find another external drive, and copy the whole thing over. When I'm done, I decide to do one last test. I close iPhoto and try Time Machine again. This time it works, iPhoto Library and all.

So, the moral of the story is, first, make sure Time Machine is backing up your large important files. How? Open the drive where Time Machine stores the backups, open the folder "backups.backupdb", open the folder with your user name, open the folder of one of the dated backups, and go through your file structure until you find the files you're most interested in. (They should be in the same places as on your computer.)

Second, if you have a large iPhoto Library (and perhaps even a small one), make sure it's closed at least some of the time when Time Machine is running.

It unnerves me to no end to know that Time Machine may randomly decide not to back up certain files. If this is really the case, then I need a new backup program. I'll let you know what Apple says.

iPhoto's new Faces feature really does work!

I take a lot of pictures. If you've ever visited my Flickr site, you know that I take my camera everywhere and I'm a bit compulsive. I've tried different programs for organizing my photo files and always come back to iPhoto. I now have more than 42,000 photos, and no other program I've found lets me just type in a date or a person's name to quickly find the photo I need.

Course, sometimes the date is not enough, and I have been, well, less than diligent in labeling my photos. Honestly, you can't label 40,000 photos and still have a life. I am pretty careful about labeling all my Events (complete with the names of all the people included in each event), and I label photos before I export them to Flickr. Still, that leaves a lot of unlabeled photos.

That's why I was curious about iPhoto's new Faces feature. The idea is that iPhoto can recognize faces in your photo collection and thus make it easy to bring up all the pictures, say, of your Uncle Henry, or in my case, of my Dad.

Here's my test of Faces.

I choose a picture of my Dad where I can see his face full on.



Then I click Name (leftmost icon at the bottom of the window). iPhoto identifies the faces and asks me to label them. (If it can't identify what's a face, you can draw a frame around the face yourself.)



I type in "John" for my Dad and press Enter.



Once I press Enter, a little arrow appears next to the name. I click it to jump to the Faces section (for this particular person).

Now the magic begins. At first, there is a tantalizing title, "John may also be in the photos below", but no pictures. But after a few moments, iPhoto brings up the photos that it thinks contain the same face as the one you labeled:



In this example, based on the single example of my Dad's face, iPhoto initially brought up 38 more pictures, every single one of which included my Dad at various stages of his life. It's not always this spot-on, but still, I think it's pretty remarkable.

Once it gives you suggestions, you can either use them for the project you're working on (say, by dragging them into an album), or you can confirm (or reject) the suggestions in order to hone iPhotos recognition.

To do confirm or reject suggestions, start by clicking the Confirm Name button at the bottom of the window.



iPhoto automatically switches to a close-up view of the face in question. This makes it really easy to see if the person you want is really in the photo. (You can also switch to close-up view without confirming suggestions by clicking the close-up button.



Then to confirm that the face belongs to the person in question, click the photo. To reject the suggestion, click twice on the photo. You can also drag to accept a bunch at once, option-click to reject with a single click, or option-drag to reject a bunch at once. Accepted photos will display the person's name on a green background as shown below. Rejected photos will show "Not [your person]" on a red background.



Once you've given iPhoto more data, click Done at the bottom of the window and it will scan your collection for more photos that include the face you're working on.

I'm pretty impressed. iPhoto found pictures of my Dad on all sorts of backgrounds, in different brightnesses, and even in old, black and white pictures that I had scanned in from 41 years ago:



And that means those photos are that much easier to get your hands on, to use, and especially, to share.

When you go to the Faces page, you can scan through all the pictures of a given person just like you might with any Event. I love just flipping through them. (To choose the one for the "cover", flip to it, and hit the spacebar.)

I'm not good at faces myself. I'm much more apt to remember what someone says to me than whether or not they have a beard or a sharp nose or some other facial feature. It's been really interesting to see which faces iPhoto confuses and which ones it considers similar. And I always love having an excuse to go through my photos. All 42,146 of them.

iPhoto Book Themes

If you're a Mac user and an iPhoto fan, you've probably thought about printing out some of your photos in a book. I highly recommend it. Ever since my friend, Nancy Bea, lost 19,000 pictures when her computer got accidently bumped to the floor, I've been more and more convinced that the only good backup is a printout.

I always find it hard to choose an iPhoto theme... partly because Apple only shows you a very small portion of what the interior pages of any given theme might look like. Some themes let you have a lot of text, some don't let you have any, some let you have one or two photos per page, some let you have many more, even up to 32.

But how to tell which iPhoto theme is the one you want?

Use my handy iPhoto theme wiki! I give a detailed description of each theme, including use of text, and number of photos. Then I actually show you what each page of each theme can look like, depending on the orientation of the photos you choose.



Hopefully, you'll find that it's a helpful tool for making your iPhoto books. Hey, the holidays are coming.

You'll also note that this site was created with PmWiki... although it's not currently open to the public for editing, it certainly could be. I used the wiki software to make it easy to create a lot of connected pages without having to write all the code by hand.