How to separate photos into Landscape vs. Portrait orientation?

I have a few thousand photos that I would like to separate into two groups:
1. Photos in landscape orientation
2. Photos in portrait orientation

Any suggestions on how to automate this?

My motivation is to make them easier to view on my iPod touch.

iMac Core Duo 2.0 Ghz | iPod classic 80 GB 5.5 gen | iPod touch 16 GB, Mac OS X (10.5.2)

Posted on May 19, 2008 10:14 AM

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5 replies

May 19, 2008 3:32 PM in response to TigerMarc

Hi Marc

Automator might help, depending on how your images vary in size. For example, say your base image size is 3000 wide x 2000 high...... ( and vice-versa in Portrait mode ) You could set automator to filter all photos from a certain album ( or the whole library ) based on the height being greater than 2000 pixels.

Of course, this all falls down if you've cropped so that the height in pixels is less than 2000 ( for example ), but it might at least leave you with less to do manually?

if you've a wide variation in image sizes, one can get a bit cleverer in the same vein, and start with a width = less than 500 height = greater than 500 ( again example only, you may not need to go that small ) then run it again with increasing sizes ( excluding the sizes you already did...) but it gets a bit fiddly I guess & still requires some manual assessment of sizes beforehand.

Automator can create a new album based on the filters you set.

I have to say, having tested it out, that although it works, it's err quite ( well, very ) slow, & iPhoto carries on sorting long after automator says the workflow has finished; but if your images are mainly one size, just varying in orientation.... it's worth a go.

May 20, 2008 4:15 PM in response to TigerMarc

Before you start, make sure you have a back-up of your albums.

Then, make a duplicate of the album so that you can delete the photos from the album thereby keeping track of which one's have not been processed yet.

Here's how I set up Automator:
[Get Specified iPhoto Items] --> [Filter Photos in iPhoto] --> [Add Photos to Album]

where
+[Get Specified iPhoto Items]+ was set to my source album
+[Filter Photos in iPhoto]+ was set to these 2 criteria: "Width >= 500" and "Height < 500" (and vice versa for Portrait orientation)
+[Add Photos to Album]+ was set to the destination Landscape (or Portrait) album

The first time it took about 8 minutes to process a thousand photos. I ran the Workflow about 10 times (twice at each pixel size like 300, 600, 800, 1000, etc.) -- each time getting faster by reducing the size of the source album. After identifying a batch of photos as landscape or portrait, I would assign them a keyword of "landscape" or "portrait" so that I could find them in the source album and remove them.

Once finished, I rebuilt the iPhoto database by holding down Command-Option while launching iPhoto.

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How to separate photos into Landscape vs. Portrait orientation?

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