A way to "staple" or "clip" photos together

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A way to "staple" or "clip" photos together

I am a graduate student in the humanities. I visit archives and return from my trips with literally thousands of images of documents. This is an increasingly common practice - I see plenty of other people using cameras. It's far cheaper than using the copy machine and archives allow it since it minimizes the risk of documents getting out of order.

The problem, though, is that I'm left with a huge collection of files - now about 35,000. I'd prefer not to print them, since I would lose a lot of the ease of navigation iPhoto affords, and because it would take weeks or months. Keywords, folders, and searching by date helps me navigate within them fairly well.

The one thing that iPhoto, in all its incarnations lacks, is a feature that lets me clip documents together. I'd like the virtual equivalent of a staple or paperclip, that lets me bind a batch of pages from the same document together. Creating distinct events would create far too many for the events folder to be manageable.

Is there a feature I've missed? Or perhaps it would be in Apple's interest to think along these lines for iPhoto updates. There are a lot of people already using photo software along these lines.

iMac, Mac OS X (10.5.1)

Posted on Dec 16, 2007 10:50 AM

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Answer 1

MrGradenko Author

Level 1

0 points

Dec 16, 2007 11:11 AM in response to MrGradenko

To clarify a bit, perhaps:

I use keywords to denote boxes that I've consulted. I can access a range of document images by selecting the keyword (or by checking my records of what I worked on when - I keep meticulous time index records). Once inside a box, though, there may still be hundreds of documents to scan. If I encounter, say images from a document that may have been 20+ pages, I may want to jump to its end. It would be helpful to be able to clip those 20+ pages together so I could hit a key and skip to the end. Moreover, it would be helpful to be able to view the contents of a keyword or date search as a collection of clipped documents - to know how many distinct documents I have to examine.

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Answer 2

Old Toad

Level 10

215,784 points

Dec 16, 2007 11:26 AM in response to MrGradenko

MrGradenko:

Welcome to the Apple Discussions. There is a couple of ways you can clip, i.e. group, photos together. One is a keyword. A photo can have more than one keyword associated with it. Then you can have Smart Albums that are specific to one or two keywords, file names or other file attribute, i.e. dates. If you think you'll have a lot of keywords then the Keyword Manager plugin for iPhoto might be what you should look at. It can nest keywords for greater "stacking" or grouping of photos.

If you need greater organizational capability then you might want to look at one of the more professional image management applications like Expression Media which was previously iView MediaPro. Not only can you have keywords but you can have categories, supplemental categories, and a number of ITPC fields like City, State, Country, Location, Event, title, Headline, Label (color), rating, Creator, Job Identifier, and many others.

However, with multiple keywords and smart albums you can do a very good job in iPhoto. You can create virtual folders to hold albums and smart albums as well as other virtual folder like this

Happy Holidays

TIP: For insurance against the iPhoto database corruption that many users have experienced I recommend making a backup copy of the Library6.iPhoto database file and keep it current. If problems crop up where iPhoto suddenly can't see any photos or thinks there are no photos in the library, replacing the working Library6.iPhoto file with the backup will often get the library back. By keeping it current I mean backup after each import and/or any serious editing or work on books, slideshows, calendars, cards, etc. That insures that if a problem pops up and you do need to replace the database file, you'll retain all those efforts. It doesn't take long to make the backup and it's good insurance.
I've created an Automator workflow application (requires Tiger), iPhoto dB File Backup, that will copy the selected Library6.iPhoto file from your iPhoto Library folder to the Pictures folder, replacing any previous version of it. It's compatible with iPhoto 08 libraries and Leopard. iPhoto does not have to be closed to run the application, just idle. You can download it at Toad's Cellar. Be sure to read the Read Me pdf file.

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Answer 3

Daiya

Level 4

1,666 points

Dec 16, 2007 11:57 AM in response to MrGradenko

Hey, I've got a similar situation, but only 2-3 weeks worth of photos. 3600, mostly from newspapers, divided by each day of the paper into events (164 events, many with 2-3 photos).

I assume you are using a separate library for research pix, of course.

Have you tried using a different events folder for each document? I think it would work. It would be a lot--but if you use option-click triangle to collapse an event in Photos view, it collapses all events, giving a skimmable list that would be easier to deal with. I'd think skimming 2000 event titles would be easier than constantly trying to sort through an event of 100. The new Events view, where you can easily look at one event at a time and page through the events, seems faster to me than viewing in Photos view, because iPhoto shows fewer thumbnails.

You can assign a keyboard shortcut to Create Event to make creating all the events easier.

And what are you trying to manage from the events view anyhow? You can set up Smart Albums (say, one for each archive) to make it more skimmable, instead of using the events view.

One other thing I did was ask an expert to write a script that copied the Event name into the photo description field. This attached the citation to every individual photo. Might be useful.

If considering a different program, anything that is scriptable should let you export the work you've already done assigning keywords and such, I suspect.

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Answer 4

Yer_Man

Level 10

165,984 points

Dec 16, 2007 12:01 PM in response to MrGradenko

You need to work in pdf rather than jpg. Convert the pics to pdf (if you use Acrobat or an App like DevonThink) you can OCR along the way. Then you can combine the pdfs (with Preview) into single searchable documents.

I set up a system like this for a family member currently finishing a Ph. D. and it works very well for her.

Yep describes itself as "iPhoto for pdf's" and it's that's pretty accurate.

DevonThink is a much more elaborate application but very powerful too.

Both apps support keywording and so on.

I really think for your purposes that pdf is a much better format that jpeg to work in.

Regards

TD

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Answer 5

MrGradenko Author

Level 1

0 points

Dec 17, 2007 7:22 AM in response to MrGradenko

Everyone - thanks for these thought-out replies. I'm really grateful for the time you took to answer this question.

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