original vs. modified photos

Don't shout "You should never edit photos in iPhoto" as well as "You've destroyed the reversible photo editing capacities!" (that's a bit contradictory, don't you think?).

No one shouted anything. No one said "You shoukd never edit photos in iPhoto" and yes, you have destroyed the non-destructive editing feature in iPhoto. No, there in nothing at all contradictory in that. And it's a courtesy to warn people when your suggestion will cause dataloss. And that's what your suggestion will do.

Finally, now that you're advising people to remove the originals (and thereby destroy their library) have you tried exporting? No?

Some corrections to points made earlier in this thread, in case someone finds this by internet search.

• Modified versions do include the original (EXIF) metadata
• Modified versions are not significantly lower quality than originals. In fact the file size is usually larger, from trying to maintain as much of the original jpg data as possible
• iPhoto is not just a photo manager. It is also a photo editor, and many people use it as such and have no interest in the originals after cropping and adjusting their images. iPhoto hides the originals from view, so the metaphor is more like a destructive photo editor.

If you have conviction and are running out of disk space, discard the unedited originals, though it's not a bad idea to first copy your library to a cheap external hard drive for archiving.

Terence's last point is good, use iPhoto's Export function rather than messing in the file system of the Library. Here's how to strip your Library to only the Modified images (or the Original where you didn't modify the image):

1. In iPhoto, select all Events
2. File > Export
3. Kind: Current
4. File Name: Use filename
5. Subfolder Format: Event Name
6. Export to a folder on your desktop
7. In iPhoto select all Events
8. Drag to iPhoto's Trash
9. Right-click iPhoto Trash, click Empty Trash
10. Drag the export folder from your desktop into iPhoto

I recently went through this procedure before using iPhoto Backup To Flickr, to ensure it only backs up Modified versions.

Better to just not use iPhoto since you do not want its features and are creating a degraded set of photos and losing the highest quality ones irretrievably - no to mention having a very complicated work flow - and what to you now do after importing a new photo?

LN

What an enormous waste of time when you could achieve the exact same effect using an app designed to work the way you want. Seriously.

Seriously, why are you guys so touchy about how people use iPhoto? It's a great program and is very easy to use, it's free, and it's the default photo library on Macs. It's not a one-trick pony, but can be adapted to different needs and workflows.

LarryHN, it is false that I "do not want its features". iPhoto is very convenient for organizing photos and has excellent tools. I use Gimp (and have used many of the other options listed) as well, but iPhoto is more convenient and better suited for subtly tweaking color temperature, bringing up shadow detail, etc.

And I just finished pointing out that these are not "degraded" photos. Do you want to back up your assertion? Start with a jpg Original. Retouch it in some inconspicuous way. Then do some pixel-peeping comparing the Original vs Modified versions.

Terrence, no it was not an enormous waste of time. It took about 15 minutes (with an SSD) during most of which I was catching up on email.

I'm not interested in a flame war. I was just answering the OP's question with something more helpful than false information and ridicule.

Actually you have the "false information" and you are starting a "flame war" attacking people

Again it is really simple - iPhoto is not for everyone and if you do not like (or understand) the way it works then the best choice is house other software that works like you want

and as to degraded - absolutely every time you export a photo which recompress a it you degrade it -maybe yu can not see it but it does happen - Physics explains that

You can do what you want - but recommending poor work flows and destructive procedures to other while claiming that they are not destructive is not nice

LN

And I just finished pointing out that these are not "degraded" photos. Do you want to back up your assertion? Start with a jpg Original. Retouch it in some inconspicuous way. Then do some pixel-peeping comparing the Original vs Modified versions.

But do you consider, that the downgrading will accumulate, if you edit the edited photos again? Each new rendering of your edited photo will add some new JPEG artefacts and remove a little detail, unless you set the quality slider so high, that the photo needs more storage than the original.

Keeping the originals will protect you from accumulating these approximation errors. And you will be able to always start from the original and be able to revert to the original with one click, if you notice, that you made a mistake. For example, a wrong white balance adjustment, because you did not notice that the display needed calibrating.

It easier to keep the originals paired with the edited versions inside the iPhoto Library and have iPhoto manage them, then to have to track down the originals in some backup folder and and have to reconnect the originals manually in an emergency.

I did what you did when I first started with iPhoto more than ten years ago. At that time I had an iBook with not much storage and I let iPhoto Diet replace the originals by the edited versions. And this mistake is haunting me until today. I have still not recovered and reconnected all original master images for the Photos that I want to keep, because it is so much work to reimport the originals again and to recreate the edits.

If you need to store originals outside your iPhoto Library, consider to use Aperture instead.

LarryHN you have another misconception. iPhoto does not recompress images when you Export, as long as you select Kind=Original or Kind=Current (modified version where available). If you export with one of these settings, then the exported version is an exact copy of the corresponding file in your iPhoto library.

By default, iPhoto does use a very high quality setting when creating Modified versions, and as a consequence they are about 40% larger than jpg originals. This means there is negligible deterioration in image quality, as anyone who has actually done the comparison would know.

Obviously if you repeatedly recompress a jpg even at the highest quality setting you will eventually get a visible degradation, but the workflow we are discussing here does not involve repeatedly recompressing, so this is not a useful comment.

Nobody is recommending that people should routinely throw away the originals! This is a workflow to answer the OP's question and obviously should only be used when you know what you're doing and when you have a specific need.

I found this useful in the following circumstance. I had scanned over 3000 negatives, but all the images required cropping where the scanner went beyond the frame of the negative. I am never going to go back and re-crop all these images. And the tool I was using to copy these to my Flickr account was not handling this iPhoto library well and was ignoring the Modified versions.

Not arguing with you, just clarifying things for other folks who may read this thread later.

Exporting at kind -> Current will get the Preview of edited photos. This will not be the same quality as an Original. The ratio of the quality to the original will rather depend on the quality of the original, among other factors. I've just done a test on a 1.4 mb Jpeg original, exported at current the resulting file is 1.2mb. Hardly 40% larger.

iPhoto hasn't created Modified versions since v7. It creates Previews - a different beast entirely. It's pretty much always smaller than the original because of the compression routine used, that's roughly equivalent to exporting at the Higher (but not maximum) quality.

Different version of iPhoto export different amounts of metadata when exporting at the current setting. SO be very wary. What you definitely won't get is added metadata - keywords, descriptions and so on that you have added in iPhoto.

Thanks for the clarification Terence.

I did all my editing of these scanned (APS) negatives in iPhoto '09 and saw the Modified versions clocking in around 4.5-6 MB versus 3-4 MB for the Originals. But I haven't done this comparison after moving this library to iPhoto '11. Guess I'll stick with '09 for my main library a little longer!