The Great iPhoto Sync Project!

I have three macs (7 if you could phones and iPads, mine and the Mrs.). An old G4, an old macbook and a new iMac at work. Boasting eh!

And we have two kids and a dog. So you add all that together you get a SHIT LOAD of digital pictures.

Originally I had a single iPhone library on my macbook. Then I got a Time Capsule and for want of saving space, I moved my library over there. Reason being that I’d only really be using iPhoto when I was at home.

That worked well enough, until I decided to hack the G4 and upgrade it to run OSX. Now it could run iPhoto too.

So I could share the library between the two machines. So far so good. Then Apple updated everything and suddenly iPhoto needed updated too, so without thinking about it, I upgraded my iPhoto library from the macbook and suddenly it wasn’t accessible from the G4 anymore.

Now, bare with me, we use the G4 in the kitchen as a Spotify machine. Recently they announced that Spotify will no longer support my old G4, no matter what OS I’ve managed to hack onto it. Therefore, I’m going to finally replace it with a mac mini. The upshot is, I’ll be able to start syncing my iPhoto’s between the machines again.

Second part of this is, I’ve also recently started paying for Dropbox. So now I have a lovely disk in the sky, I can save things too. And my reasoning is, that my work machine, and two home machines, can now all be pointed to the same Dropbox iPhoto library.

It’s pretty easy to do ( I think) but it’s given me a baseline from which I really should take full advantage and finally get round to that job I’ve been putting off for years. I’m going to “sort” my digital photo album!

This means I have at least 10,000 pics to go through. Delete the crap and only hang onto the good ones. So I’m going to do it like this.

Export everything from both iPhoto libraries. Combine in with all iPhoto Photosync backups and import into a brand new iPhoto library on Dropbox. Then I’ll run Duplicate Annihilator to remove the copies, leaving me with a ton of images to sort though and clean.

That’s the plan anyway, I’ll let you know how I get on!

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UPDATE This is proving to be a UTTER FUCKING NIGHTMARE.Getting iPhone to work on the dropbox was easy. Totally simple and works like a charm. Sorting through 15K pictures from 3 to 4 different libraries sucks.
I used iPhoto Library Manager to merge them all together. Then I ran Duplicate Annihilator to clear out the mess. It only partially worked.
I’m not sure where the problem lies. I’m thinking it’s with iPhone Library Manager as I’ve used Duplicate Annihilator loads of times before and it’s always worked like a charm. However, it’s not picking up the duplicates from the different merged libraries, only the ones from within the same library. So I’ve now got up to 5 different versions of the same pics. But it’s not consistent, some are fine, some have 1 duplicate, some 2 or 3 or 4 or 5.
ARGH.
I’ve cut my losses, and put everything into ONE MASSIVE library and am now manually sorting the images, it’s taken almost a month to get this far and a LOT of hassle.
One other thing, as soon as I ran the merge, a lot of video files I had in the library were sent to 0:00:00 time frame and not just the imported ones but the originals too. So I’ve lost a ton of movies Which also sucks.
So to cut an already long rant short, ditch iPhoto Manger, export everything to a hard disk from each library, manually sort the images yourself, then reimport into a new iPhoto library. You’ll lose album info etc, but you can always just resort that by hand. Trust me, in the long run you’ll save time.