Monday 4 June 2007

More iPhoto problems

As I mentioned in Using iPhoto with Picasa, when you import photos into iPhoto, it has the annoying habit of generating copies of any photos that were marked as "rotated" on your camera. I assume this is for the benefit of any image applications that don't read the "orientation" flag in the photo's EXIF tag, which apparently OS X didn't even support until 10.4 or so. However to me it's just wasting about 1Gb storing useless duplicates which I don't need.

I haven't found any way to turn this behaviour off, and have not as yet been able to work around it. If I just delete the rotated image in iPhoto's Modified folder, then iPhoto shows a "missing file" graphic, and FrontRow shows a blank screen for that photo. If I then try "Revert to Original" in iPhoto, it simply re-creates the rotated copy.

I've even manually tried editing iPhoto's AlbumData.xml (probably not a good idea) and pointing it towards the original instead of the rotated copy. Still no good - iPhoto just re-generates the copy.

I'm sure there must be a way around it, I'll post an update when I've played around with it some more.