Iphoto Events Tips

Though Iphoto is pretty intuitive, there are some things that you probably aren’t aware of and that Apple doesn’t easily release.  Thankfully, there are plenty of techno geeks out there who are always willing to share their discoveries. Here are a couple that you can play around with.

Export iPhoto events into appropriate directory structure (Mac OS X hints)

Iphoto cannot create directory structures when you export events and albums.However, by exporting photos with easy-to-remember file names, you can create the structure of the directory.

Perform a Batch Change to set the Title to Event Name. Export the photos using the Title as the File Name. Use the code below and make it executable  (chmod a+x filename in Terminal).

# First, in iPhoto select all events and do Photos > Batch Change
# Set Title to Event Name
# With all events highlighted, export events a folder somewhere, for filename use title
# Photos will be exported with filename of "event - number.jpg" (ex: Animals - 0004.jpg)
# This script will create the appropriate directory structure based on those filenames
# Set the photo_dir variable below to the full path of the directory

photo_dir=/Users/Thom/Desktop/iPhotoExport

cd $photo_dir

for filename in *
do

#takes the string preceding the dash, trims leading and trailing whitespace, then removes all non web-friendly characters
dir=`echo $filename | cut -d- -f1 | sed ’s/^[ ]//’ | sed ’s/[ ]$//’ | sed ’s/[^A-Za-z0-9 _]//g’`

#takes the string following the dash, trims leading and trailing whitespace
file=`echo $filename | cut -d- -f2 | sed ’s/^[ ]//’ | sed ’s/[ ]$//’`

#if directory doesn’t yet exist, create it
if ! test -d “${dir}”
then
mkdir “${dir}”
fi

#move file to the appropriate directory and rename it to numeric filename
mv “${filename}” “${dir}/${file}”

done

Set the photo_dir variable to the path of your Iphoto Export .  The executed script will create the directories and move the photos into them

For Iphoto ‘08* (You may want to test this out on the latest Iphoto as well)

Create a Keyboard Shortcut – Mac OS X Hints

Use the script below and attach to the  Butler Productivity Tool

tell application "iPhoto"
  activate
  select album "photos"
  tell application "System Events" to tell process "iPhoto"
    delay 0.25
    key code 48 --tab
    key code 126 --up arrow
    key code 5 --G scroll selected event into view
  end tell
end tell