Migrating from iPhoto to Windows Photo Management

 

This is part of a series of posts in which I document my “switch” from Mac to Windows. This post discusses how I moved my photo libraries from Mac iPhoto to Windows.

Preface: iPhoto Library Management

I have a few challenges with iPhoto, which were part of the reason for my switch from a Mac laptop to a Windows desktop:
#1. I have too many photos to fit in an iPhoto library. I have ~20K photos, but iPhoto can only handle about ~5K before it gets sluggish and crashy.
#2. I have too many photos for my Mac laptop hard drive. I have a 120GB hard drive, which can’t hold all my software and movies and music and photos. So, I need to split off an “archive” library.
#2. I want to migrate my photos over time, while keeping my ability to process new photos without mixing up or losing anything.
iPhoto Buddy is the first part of the solution to these challenges. With iPhoto Buddy, we can split one giant iPhoto Library into several min-libraries. (iPhoto Library Manager could help too, but the free trial version didn’t work for me. If you are feeling confident and are willing to pay up front, I think it would be a good tool.)
It’s important to engage iPhoto Buddy long before your hard drive fills up, because you’ll need to temporarily make 2 copies of your iPhoto library, and you’ll want to work on your primary (fastest) storage disk.
Anyway, the general plan is to duplicate your iPhoto library, and then remove complementary chunks from each, creating two smaller libraries whose photos/albums/events combine to equal the original library. Then, we can take time to migrate the older “archive” libraries, while still adding and editing photos in the last library with our current photos. As long as we don’t edit any photos in the archive (but viewing and exporting is OK), we don’t have to worry about and data corruption/loss due to the migration.

Migration

I am running PhoShare to liberate my photos from iPhoto. I used iPhoto Buddy (described earlier) to split my library into 5 smaller libraries that are a few gigabytes in size with a few thousand photos in each. Next, run a PhoShare export that copies photos (and events, keywords, ratings, faces) from the Mac system/disk over to the Windows system/disk.
Specifically, share a directory from my Windows machine via SMB over the local network, and make that shared directory writable by my user account.
Then, instruct PhoShare export the photos to that SMB-mounted volume. Important PhoShare settings to note:

1. Export events, not albums, since we don’t want duplicates of all the files. (We have to make a choice here; there is no good way to keep Events and Albums / Smart Albums.)
2. Disable “Use file links”, since we are exporting to a remote disk.
3. Add {yyyy}-{mm}-{dd} to the “Folder names”, to help the Windows photo management tools (Windows Live Photo Gallery, or Picasa) sort the event by date.
4. Use {ascii_name} in Folder names, and {ascii title} in File names, to keep special characters from causing trouble in file names. I chose {title_description} for the captions.

Please read the rest of this article before executing the next step, which will take quite a bit of time and disk space. You need to make some decisions that will affect your choices in the PhoShare export.
Do a Dry Run first and check that the dry run log shows reasonable-looking behavior (check filenames especially). Then take a moment to be sure that you will be able to ensure the Mac and Windows machines stay networked together for the next 2-24 hours.  Finally, Start Export, and let PhoShare do its work.
Repeat this whole section for each “archive” iPhoto Library. When you are ready, you can choose to keep the Mac around for your “current” library, or choose take a break from photo management for the day or so it takes to move the “current” library to Windows and get set up there.

Managing Photos on Windows

Once a photo library is exported to Windows, feel free to start editing/re-organizing the photos on Windows. I recommend a light touch at first, getting accustomed to how Windows photo management works, and finding a workflow that you are happy with before you cut ties with the Mac. If something goes horribly wrong, you can go back the Mac and re-export the library from scratch. It’s nice if you don’t do too much throwaway work on Windows before you make your final decisions, though, so be careful at first.
Windows Live Essentials Photo Gallery and Picasa are your two main “gallery management” options. Neither one of them hijacks your files and directories like iPhoto, so feel free to mix and match them. They are both uglier than iPhoto, and both have both missing and extra features; adapt to your new world. Cheer yourself up by making nice panoramas in Photo Gallery, with much less effort than the wonderful-but-complicated Hugin required back on the Mac.
Dealing with Originals
If you are a hoarder / constructivist like me, you cannot bear the thought of losing your original (over-sized, miscolored) photos. Photo management programs (iPhoto, Picasa, Live Photo Gallery) each have their own superficially-incompatible ways of preserving orginal photos.

• iPhoto maintains two directories: Masters and Previews (aka Originals and Modified, respectively), and uses the iPhoto UI to “overlay” the Preview tree over the Masters tree, so that you see all Preview photos, and also and Masters photos that are not “shadowed” by a Previews photo with the same filename.
• Picasa (3+) maintains a “.picasaoriginals” directory inside each photo directory, and *moves* original master photos there before saving a modified photo.
• Live Photo Gallery maintains a single folder  “Originals” with a pool of all originals, and uses some database system to match modified photos to originals.

In my opinion, Picasa’s model is the safest and most correct. This may the single reason to use Picasa for all bulk management of changes, and only use Windows Photo Gallery for one-at-a-time edits of a photo after Picasa has safely stowed an original.
PhoShare follows the Picasa model. After exporting from PhoShare, your iPhoto Originals will be split into two camps: Pictures that were never modified will have their Original file be promoted (moved) to the “main” photo folder. Only photos that were already modified (and so had two versions already in iPhoto) will have an Original version in the PhoShare export.
If you want to “port” the Originals folder to Picasa, you can simply (manually, or using a script) rename all those “Originals” folders to “.picasaoriginals”. PhoShare can also do this for you, but there is no GUI control for this option. You’ll need to use the command-line interface to pass the “—picasaoriginals” option to PhoShare.

To-Do

• Split the Photo Event folders into Year/Month sub-directories, for easier navigation
• Port Star-ratings (which PhoShare moved to “tags”) from EXIF to Windows Photo Gallery format?
• Set up Picasa/Flickr sync.
• Enjoy managing photos on Windows?