IPHOTO 11 WONT IMPORT MP4 FILES FROM MY CAMERA

Amusing. Obviously your knowledge of MicroSoft is as rich as your knowledge of iPhoto, and that's right up there with your ability to run a spellcheck. Given that millions of people around the world manage to use iPhoto, and you - as you say yourself - cannot make sense of the app does say rather more about you than it does about iPhoto.

Before you recommend that people simply organise their files in the Finder and then 'add comments, key words etc', you really should point out that these will be simple spotlight comments, will not be recognised by any other app on any other OS, nor any Photo app on your Mac or any other OS. So, if you do this and migrate at some point, or of you share these photos to someone else on any machine, then you'll need to do all that work again.

I am glad I found this thread. I too am having problem with mp4 file improt to iPhotos and thought this can't be true (but sadly, of course, it is). In any case, I do feel Apple is slowly becoming the M$ of this generation. Their softwares are less and less intitutive with each upgrade...this coming from a long time Mac user....never own a PC on my life.

This is rather sad. Having just bought a new iMac (at significant cost) I was going to stop using Google's Picasa and move over to iPhoto, but my import bought up hundreds of errors for importing MOV, MP4 & MPG. Since it seems like iPhoto isn't able to handle these movie files, I guess I'm stuck with Picasa for the forseable future.

Shame on Apple. You have what looks like a decent product that fails completely at handling video, and frankly I see all my photo and video media as being similar so I don't see why my highly integrated Mac experience should suddenly be fractured by managing video in one app and photos in another with completely seperate libraries for each. In this respect Google got it right and reading this thread it seems like Apple is going backwards on the media management front which is stunning to me.

iPhoto is about Photos

iMovie is about movies

SOrt of like using one program for spreadsheets and a different one for documents

And note that this forum is strictly a volenteer user to user forum - It is specifically NOT a path to Apple

LN

When you have small children, your camera (be it digital or our ipads, iphones, ipods) often holds pics and movies of kids doing their thing. The idea to separate the two is inconceivable and plain dumb. Heck, iphotos used to work. Then some genius developer (likelly kidless) decided it would be wise to split the two, forcing you to use a separate app in order to categorize your media.

Cpharvey, if you go back a couple of pages, you'll see my solution to your dilemma, which was the exact same I had. The solution is simple: drop iphotos altogether. Trust me, since doing so my life became a lot simpler. Now i have my photos and videos on folders in my drive, a direct drag and drop from my camera (or if using an idevice, use Image Capture). Sure, I may not be able to take advantage of some of the features that iphoto used to offer, but i can add keywords and dates to the folders holding my media. Since dropping iphotos years ago, life has been easy.

It is truly unfortunate that the best solution to this is to resort to a third party app. But that's what Apple gets for hiring former Microsoft employees and not forcing them to watch a video on how to think freely.

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Insults are uncessary

And no - it is not a stupid blind user posting - it is an example of a user that understands HOW THINGS WORK and helps people use iPHoto the way it works - this forum is strictly about volenteer users helping other users use the software as it is - it is not about what could be, what should be, what might be, what anyone wnats things to be - it is only about what is -- and what is is that iMovie is about Movies -and what iPhoto is is about photos - iPhoto has some limited ability to work with them

So you go have a nice day - posting insults here is hightly inappropriate

LN

<Edited by Host>

And again:

Before you recommend that people simply organise their files in the Finder and then 'add comments, key words etc', you really should point out that these will be simple spotlight comments, will not be recognised by any other app on any other OS, nor any Photo app on your Mac or any other OS. So, if you do this and migrate at some point, or of you share these photos to someone else on any machine, then you'll need to do all that work again.

I agree with Joolz in so much as events are now a combination of both pictures and videos. I haven't found a way to combine these two mediums into one "event" using both iPhoto and iMovie. Is there a way?

Joolz, take a look at Google's Picasa. I'm not here pitching it, in fact I'm trying to move away from it, but it sounds like me that you have your pictures and videos in folders (mine happen to be by month/year) and Picasa allows you to overlay an event on top of that which may include some or all of the photos and videos in a directory/folder.

As to the analogy of iPhotos and iMovie being like Word and Excel, I don't agree with that. It's more like the distinction between Word and Textedit. i.e. similar mediums and Word can handle text docs just fine, which is apparently what iPhoto was capable of in the past with videos.

Lastly, although this might be a user based help forum, if you anyone thinks the product managers at Apple don't casually read these forums for hot-topics you are being naive.

We have no idea who at Apple, if anyone, reads these forums. What we say is that there is no guarantee that the post will be read, whereas the Feedback will be. If the rate of fixes offered for long standing and common problems in iPhoto is anything to go by, then you're rather more naive to think that they do...

And you have clearly never worked in product management or engineering for a major electronics company.

Any thoughts on my question above regarding mixed media projects?

So you're saying that they read the forums for hot-topics... and then ignore them?

There are a number of potential causes for the issues you describe - and a lot of them have to do with the codecs used in the videos. They vary widely and depend largely on the source of the video. There really is very little standardisation in cunsumer video, unlike photography. So my first query would be as to the source of the videos - where do they come from? Have they been previously processed in any way?

The video support on iPhoto is very much a tack on, concieved in the early days of video on P&S cameras. It's never been designed for multi-media organisation, and frankly, there is a significant gap in the market for such a project, imho. I use iTunes to manage home videos.

I know this is a fairly old thread but the solution to most video import problems is to...

1) Close iPhoto

2) Open Terminal

3) Run the following terminal command:

sudo /usr/libexec/xpchelper --rebuild-cache

4) Reopen iPhoto and try importing your video it should work now.